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It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat. Our bodies produce all of the enzymes, such as protease and lipase, necessary for the

It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat. Our bodies produce all of the enzymes, such as protease and lipase, necessary for the breakdown and absorption of meat. The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things. Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to develop moral "philosophies" and become "vegetarians" effectively masking our more savage nature. Make no mistake, You are biologically designed to kill and eat flesh. And if you can kill it and eat it, of course you can experiment on it.

codebolt 5y ago
Human beings are also designed for aggression towards each other, yet we generally try to control those parts of our 'savage nature' in modern society. Torturing defenseless animals is not an inescapable facet of human nature. It's something we choose to do and be OK with.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  >Human beings are also designed for aggression towards each other, yet we generally try to control those parts of our 'savage nature' in modern society. No. There is no evolutionary benefit for raw aggression. Raw aggression appears during times of limited resources where aggression contributes to survival. Humans as all living things, are designed to survive and use any means to achieve it. Given minimal resources we all will revert to our primal natures. >Torturing defenseless animals is not an inescapable facet of human nature. It's something we choose to do and be OK with. Nothing is inescapable. You are designed by nature to live out a certain lifetime yet you can escape your nature by killing yourself. This does not change your fundamental nature. We are more prone to follow our nature then to ignore it.
  - robotresearcher 5y ago
    > There is no evolutionary benefit for raw aggression. Raw aggression appears during times of limited resources where aggression contributes to survival. Those sentences seem to contradict each other very directly.
    - deltaonefour 5y ago
      The benefit doesn't just exist for no reason. It only exists because of limited resources. When resources are not limited we don't display aggressive behavior. We are not living in a time of limited resources therefore it is actually evolutionary detrimental for us to be aggressive. It's not a coincidence that our popular culture de-emasculates itself bit by bit every decade. It's because we live in plentiful times and our behavior (which is conditioned through natural selection) reflects this.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  > Human beings are also designed for aggression towards each other, yet we generally try to control those parts of our 'savage nature' in modern society. Yes, we've developed quite sophisticated organizations to coordinate the violence, and then developed quite sophisticated weapons to carry it out.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    With the end result of vastly fewer deaths from violence per capita compared to primitive societies.
    - notch656a 5y ago
      This sounds true at face but do we have any evidence that violence per capita is lower here now than it is in a tighter but less organized clan society of yesteryear where any violence you would perpetrate would either be against your own extended family or outside aggressors (and modern society or at least US is already very brutal to outside nations).
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      On the other hand, also a level of terror unimaginable in the past if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
screamingninja 5y ago
No, humans are omnivores, not carnivores. Our bodies are designed to function on a wide variety of food including fresh produce. To each their own, but consuming meat is a choice, not a necessity.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  A swiss army knife is designed to be used in many different ways. Just because you don't use all the ways doesn't mean it's not designed for it. You are an omnivore and you are designed to eat meat. Additionally, you are not designed to eat cellulose which is a huge component of what it means to be a herbivore. You are designed to eat meat, and designed to eat certain types of veggies. Who's to say that the veggie part is just the back up mechanism? Either way you ARE designed to eat veggies and MEAT, you can choose to eat veggies and deny half your nature, yes.. that is your choice.
  - screamingninja 5y ago
    > Either way you ARE designed to eat veggies and MEAT, you can choose to eat veggies and deny half your nature, yes.. that is your choice. Is that similar to you only acknowledging being designed to eat meat and denying half of your nature?
    - deltaonefour 5y ago
      No I acknowledge both. So how am I denying my nature. Just FYI, I have no skin in this game. Call me evil call me denying my own nature, I'm just looking at this all as if I was a psychopath (I'm not).
    - inawarminister 5y ago
      There are people who do carnivory diet, eating 100% meat and organs for a while. They are mostly okay, some have their health better than their previous diet. Human body is awesome in our flexibility in seeking niches.
    - necovek 5y ago
_nothing 5y ago
Chasing an animal down, killing it, and eating it is in my opinion a significantly different activity than subjecting it to thirty likely-invasive procedures over the course of its life and then continuing to perform experiments on its dead body. Not saying it's more or less morally questionable, but significantly different. Evolutionary biology is overused as justification for human behavior. We were not "designed" to eat meat because we were not designed. We evolved the capacity to eat meat just as we evolved a capacity for sympathy/empathy. Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  >Evolutionary biology is overused as justification for human behavior. Let me get one thing straight. I am not justifying anything. My angle is, what's the point? Don't justify anything at all. We're evil for killing, so be it. I am looking at it from a completely dispassionate angle. I do not need to somehow merge and mutate my moral framework to make it work with the existing reality. >We were not "designed" to eat meat because we were not designed. Ok we were "designed" by natural selection to eat meat. I am not making a theological argument. > Chasing an animal down, killing it, and eating it is in my opinion a significantly different activity than subjecting it to thirty likely-invasive procedures over the course of its life and then continuing to perform experiments on its dead body. Not saying it's more or less morally questionable, but significantly different. In the wild, carnivores devour the flesh of their prey while it is alive and awake. Possibly more significant if not equal in being morally questionable. >Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise. No it is not. But what is surprising is that this empathy is the dominant behavior to our own evolutionary detriment (however mild). Empathy evolved to aid in survival of our genome, but when empathy evolves to the point where we are unable experiment on animals to assist in helping our own species... that is something unnatural.
  - _nothing 5y ago
    I think we're on the same page in believing that there's not an inherent morality to these behaviors. I'm not accusing of you to try to justify some morally evil act. The comment you originally replied to said this: > Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature To which you replied: > It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat. > The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things. What I was responding to was the claim that because we evolved the capacity to eat meat, we should naturally be dispassionate to the killing of animals. What I'm saying is that since we evolved both the capacity for carnivory and sympathy, that our capacity for eating animals does not make our sympathy for animals at all unnatural. It's not unnatural for us to want to kill animals for our survival. But it's also not unnatural for us to care about and feel sympathy towards animals. I feel that you've been using our capacity for meat-eating to deem vegetarianism, sympathy towards animals, etc. as against our nature. With that, the point of my differentiating between the act of hunting and eating animals versus experimenting with them and their dead bodies is comparable to the difference in severity of humans fighting each other versus torturing each other. Humans clearly have the capacity for both, and yet one typically elicits a higher negative reaction in people than the other. Our ability to empathize with all sorts of pain falls along such an axis. Edit: To your last point, if people naturally develop an empathy towards animals so strong that it overrides their own sense of self-preservation, why is that unnatural? Is a human giving their life to save other humans unnatural? That's exactly why I keep repeating that there is no "design" - or if you'd prefer, "intent". There is no rule in nature that says species are supposed to prioritize the survival of their own, and so deviating from that nonexistent rule is not unnatural. If experimenting on animals is absolutely necessary to humanity's survival and humanity one day refuses, it will simply die out like millions of species before it. Going extinct isn't unnatural either.
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conradev 5y ago
That is like saying biologically speaking, 65% of the world’s population isn’t designed to drink milk, because they don’t produce the enzyme lactase. Yes, it is true. No, it does not mean anything on its own. Those same moral philosophies stop us from killing each other for sport, even though it is in our “savage nature”. Meat consumption is ultimately driven by consumer choice, and consumers will choose what they want to eat
riversflow 5y ago
> Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to develop moral "philosophies" You've got it backwards; Human's current abundance is the creation of human cooperation, which doesn't really work without some sort of ethical framework. Philosophy enables us to achieve more, it is not the result of our achievement.
- krageon 5y ago
  A dictatorship is a human cooperation as well and while it technically has an ethical framework it's not exactly a victory of philosophy.
  - Strs2FillMyDrms 5y ago
    "Dicatorship and Cooperation are the same thing, lots of people are telling me this, rigth now!"
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  In order to achieve the leisure time you need to develop these philosophies you need civilization first. Otherwise you'd be too worried about hunting and gathering to even find the time to think about these things. A very Complex civilization requires what you talk about, but make no mistake; civilization itself came first.
  - Sporktacular 5y ago
    That depends how you define civilisation. Margaret Mead said it started the moment people went from abandoning to caring for each other in spite of catastrophic injuries that would have required very long periods of recovery. Someone made the decision to care for another, much less functional person at their own significant expense. Was a philosophical principle behind that or just enlightened self interest? Maybe we have an innate capacity for empathy. Other animals appear to as well.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
You are also designed not to harm your fellow beings. That may sound like a contradiction, but it's just the "fellow beings" parts that is culturally or individually changed. There have been soldiers who went to war who couldn't shoot their enemies, even though they might even have "wanted" to. Compassion seems to be a very fundamental building block of the Human mind.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  You are designed to survive. If that survival involves harming people than that is what will occur. You are also designed to fuck a woman and make her pregnant and many men will fulfill this goal at any cost. Hence why rape exists.
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    None of that is true. There are stories over stories of Humans refusing to do harm to other Humans even if it means their death. Conditioning Humans to kill other Humans often involves dehumanizing the enemy in order to circumvent that built-in safety measure. Not everybody can just defuse that switch when he needs to. You are ASSuming I am male and heterosexual. You are assuming homosexuality has somehow not evolved naturally or does not play a part in the natural repertoire of Human social structure (spoiler alert: it does, even in terms of procreation). You do not understand sexual desire, which is not about reproduction, even though reproduction can be a side effect (and usually isn't, even without contraception). You do not understand rape and sexual assault which often is not about sex or sexual pleasure.
    - deltaonefour 5y ago
      >None of that is true. There are stories over stories of Humans refusing to do harm to other Humans even if it means their death. These people won't exist given enough time and selection pressure. It's the only logical outcome. Additionally given the nature of natural selection it can be said many many of these people don't exist at all. The majority of the world will not do this unless it has some evolutionary benefit. And that benefit only exists among our genetic progeny. Parents will sacrifice themselves for their kids because of the evolutionary benefit. >You are ASSuming I am male and heterosexual. You are assuming homosexuality has somehow not evolved naturally or does not play a part in the natural repertoire of Human social structure (spoiler alert: it does, even in terms of procreation). You're the ASS here. You can make an argument without throwing an insult. First off I made no assumption about you personally. I also never stated anything about homosexuality. You know what I am? I'm black, I'm trans and lesbian. You're assuming that I'm white, male and straight out of nowhere. Oh how the woke world will destroy you for making such baseless assumptions. Man who cares. >You are assuming homosexuality has somehow not evolved naturally or does not play a part in the natural repertoire of Human social structure I never said I assumed such a thing. I made no statement about this. You made the statement that it DOES play a natural part. I've heard of these arguments. What evidence do you have to support this? I am not talking about logical arguments that illustrate the possibility that homosexuality is an evolved trait. But empirical statistical evidence that show unmistakably that it is an evolved trait. The arguments I hear as it stands sounds a bit convoluted and only shows that homosexuality being an evolved trait is only a theoretical possibility. >You do not understand sexual desire, which is not about reproduction, even though reproduction can be a side effect Ok this is just BS. When did I say sexual desire is only about reproduction? We're done here.
gerash 5y ago
I agree with this take. Chimps kill and eat smaller monkeys all the time. If you watch any nature documentary you can see how ruthless animals are as it's all a survival game after all. I'm no biologist but the empathy / sympathy part also seems to be an evolved trait. It should bring stability to a social group and reduce injuries due to needless in-fighting which effectively ensures better survival as a group.
- deleted 5y ago
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- Sporktacular 5y ago
  "It should bring stability to a social group and reduce injuries due to needless in-fighting which effectively ensures better survival as a group." That's probably how it started, but the definition of social group expanded as we came to realise how arbitrary and culturally determined social group boundaries are. Once we account for those biases, and start to see all animals as just trying to survive in the world, it's a natural progression to extend that empathy to them too.
  - gerash 5y ago
    Including all living creatures isn't quite useful in terms of survival chances. Thinking about this topic, we could also philosophize the whole "torture" aspect. Presumably it means physical pain to an animal which many feel uneasy about. But if you think about it, pain, as signals to the brain are also evolved mechanisms in order to survive. Pain is a crude signal indicating that the life of that animal is in danger but they are not perfect indicators. If pain signals were more accurate they would activate the moment an animal approaches a human with a shotgun similar to how you feel pain touching boiling water. But the pain mechanism hasn't become that sophisticated yet. So even the pain is an arbitrary crude mechanism so real "torture" would be loss of habitat for example but animals won't feel that as pain.
nsonha 5y ago
> The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things stupid comment of the year. We kill and eat animals, we sympathize with animals being killed, like where is the contradiction? How about sympathize with animals being killed unnecessarily? (I'm no longer talking about experimenting, just killing in general) How about we kill other human beings in wars, in capital punishment, does that elude having sympathy for them? > Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to... ...kill in excess, bingo
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  >stupid comment of the year. You call me stupid and yet you're stupid enough to think that I care about anything else you have to say after you call me stupid? Why even bother wasting your breath?
  - deleted 5y ago
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kaba0 5y ago
No, we can eat meat but we are by no means obligate carnivores like cats are. A cat will die on a no-meat diet, while we can easily live on plants alone.
- Simon_says 5y ago
  > we can easily live on plants alone. This has only been true for about the past 50 years, when vitamin B12 was synthesized. There's no plant source for the vitamin. And I'm not even sure the vegans call a vegan diet "easy".
- johnisgood 5y ago
  No. Lack of meat leads to vitamin B12 deficiency which gives you all sorts of neurological issues. Pretty damn horrible ones. > The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics warns of the risk of vitamin B12 deficiencies in vegetarians and vegans. Vitamin B12 is found naturally only in animal products. A lack of vitamin B12 can lead to anemia and blindness. It can also cause muscle weakness, tingling, and numbness. We might not die, we will just get severely disabled. It pretty much mimics MS.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Algae has plenty of B12. Also, this is a vitamin deficiency, compared to obligate carnivores like cat that can’t digest plants. It is a significant difference between the two.
    - johnisgood 5y ago
      > The usual dietary sources of vitamin B(12) are animal foods, meat, milk, egg, fish, and shellfish. As the intrinsic factor-mediated intestinal absorption system is estimated to be saturated at about 1.5-2.0 microg per meal under physiologic conditions, vitamin B(12) bioavailability significantly decreases with increasing intake of vitamin B(12) per meal. The bioavailability of vitamin B(12) in healthy humans from fish meat, sheep meat, and chicken meat averaged 42%, 56%-89%, and 61%-66%, respectively. Vitamin B(12) in eggs seems to be poorly absorbed (< 9%) relative to other animal food products. In the Dietary Reference Intakes in the United States and Japan, it is assumed that 50% of dietary vitamin B(12) is absorbed by healthy adults with normal gastro-intestinal function. Some plant foods, dried green and purple lavers (nori) contain substantial amounts of vitamin B(12), although other edible algae contained none or only traces of vitamin B(12). Most of the edible blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) used for human supplements predominantly contain pseudovitamin B(12), which is inactive in humans. The edible cyanobacteria are not suitable for use as vitamin B(12) sources, especially in vegans. Fortified breakfast cereals are a particularly valuable source of vitamin B(12) for vegans and elderly people. Production of some vitamin B(12)-enriched vegetables is also being devised.[1] So it seems like that despite them containing substantial amounts of vitamin B12, they are not suitable for use as vitamin B12 sources because they predominantly contain pseudovitamin B12 which is inactive in humans. They recommend fortified breakfast cereals for vegans. What you said about cats inability to digest plants is of no significance here. Vitamin deficiency - especially this particular one - is life-threatening. We need it. We can definitely have plants, and we may need plants as well, but we do need to eat something that contains substantial amounts of non-pseudovitamin B12, which is meat. Of course you can just be a vegan and supplement vitamin B12, but... [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17959839/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17959839/
cheese_goddess 5y ago
Cats are "biologically designed to kill and eat flesh" but have you ever seen what cats do to the animals they capture for food? On the other hand, humans don't, as a rule torture our food and we usually kill our food before we eat it. Not all meat-eating animals have the same kind of behaviour toward their prey. Humans are "biologically designed" to love other animals and care for them. Not in an Elmyra Duff kind of way, but in the way that has allowed us to tame and domesticate the wild ancestors of the animals we still live with. In the same way that our animals have a docile and calm nature that allows them to be domesticated, we have a caring and loving nature that allows us to domesticate them. We are not lions. A lion could not domesticate a flock of sheep. It would just fall on the sheep and slaughter them, on the first day. Without our love for animals, which is just as ingrained into us as our love of eating their flesh, we wouldn't be who we are today, our civilisation wouldn't be what it is today, our bodies and brains wouldn't be what they are today. Those animals have given us so much, and they will continue to give us even more. The least we can do is to treat them with respect and ensure they have a dignified life and a dignified death.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  > A lion could not domesticate a flock of sheep. It would just fall on the sheep and slaughter them, on the first day. What a simplistic view of lions. I agree that lions don't really have the capacity to domesticate a flock of sheep, but to suggest that they're mindless killing machines that would meaninglessly mass slaughter sheep the first chance they got is weird. They're complicated creatures with rich emotional lives, and I've personally seen them plenty of times pass up opportunities to kill because there was no point. Interestingly, there's also lots of youtube footage of lions and other big cats attempting to care for other animals (albeit typically ineptly).
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago
    It seems my views are not simplistic enough to not warrant a snotty response from someone who knows so much better. Oh, what tortured lives we simple folk must live...
  - 5y ago

codebolt 5y ago

Human beings are also designed for aggression towards each other, yet we generally try to control those parts of our 'savage nature' in modern society. Torturing defenseless animals is not an inescapable facet of human nature. It's something we choose to do and be OK with.

deltaonefour 5y ago
>Human beings are also designed for aggression towards each other, yet we generally try to control those parts of our 'savage nature' in modern society. No. There is no evolutionary benefit for raw aggression. Raw aggression appears during times of limited resources where aggression contributes to survival. Humans as all living things, are designed to survive and use any means to achieve it. Given minimal resources we all will revert to our primal natures. >Torturing defenseless animals is not an inescapable facet of human nature. It's something we choose to do and be OK with. Nothing is inescapable. You are designed by nature to live out a certain lifetime yet you can escape your nature by killing yourself. This does not change your fundamental nature. We are more prone to follow our nature then to ignore it.
- robotresearcher 5y ago
  > There is no evolutionary benefit for raw aggression. Raw aggression appears during times of limited resources where aggression contributes to survival. Those sentences seem to contradict each other very directly.
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    The benefit doesn't just exist for no reason. It only exists because of limited resources. When resources are not limited we don't display aggressive behavior. We are not living in a time of limited resources therefore it is actually evolutionary detrimental for us to be aggressive. It's not a coincidence that our popular culture de-emasculates itself bit by bit every decade. It's because we live in plentiful times and our behavior (which is conditioned through natural selection) reflects this.
emodendroket 5y ago
> Human beings are also designed for aggression towards each other, yet we generally try to control those parts of our 'savage nature' in modern society. Yes, we've developed quite sophisticated organizations to coordinate the violence, and then developed quite sophisticated weapons to carry it out.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  With the end result of vastly fewer deaths from violence per capita compared to primitive societies.
  - notch656a 5y ago
    This sounds true at face but do we have any evidence that violence per capita is lower here now than it is in a tighter but less organized clan society of yesteryear where any violence you would perpetrate would either be against your own extended family or outside aggressors (and modern society or at least US is already very brutal to outside nations).
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    On the other hand, also a level of terror unimaginable in the past if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

screamingninja 5y ago

No, humans are omnivores, not carnivores. Our bodies are designed to function on a wide variety of food including fresh produce. To each their own, but consuming meat is a choice, not a necessity.

deltaonefour 5y ago
A swiss army knife is designed to be used in many different ways. Just because you don't use all the ways doesn't mean it's not designed for it. You are an omnivore and you are designed to eat meat. Additionally, you are not designed to eat cellulose which is a huge component of what it means to be a herbivore. You are designed to eat meat, and designed to eat certain types of veggies. Who's to say that the veggie part is just the back up mechanism? Either way you ARE designed to eat veggies and MEAT, you can choose to eat veggies and deny half your nature, yes.. that is your choice.
- screamingninja 5y ago
  > Either way you ARE designed to eat veggies and MEAT, you can choose to eat veggies and deny half your nature, yes.. that is your choice. Is that similar to you only acknowledging being designed to eat meat and denying half of your nature?
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    No I acknowledge both. So how am I denying my nature. Just FYI, I have no skin in this game. Call me evil call me denying my own nature, I'm just looking at this all as if I was a psychopath (I'm not).
  - inawarminister 5y ago
    There are people who do carnivory diet, eating 100% meat and organs for a while. They are mostly okay, some have their health better than their previous diet. Human body is awesome in our flexibility in seeking niches.
  - necovek 5y ago

_nothing 5y ago

Chasing an animal down, killing it, and eating it is in my opinion a significantly different activity than subjecting it to thirty likely-invasive procedures over the course of its life and then continuing to perform experiments on its dead body. Not saying it's more or less morally questionable, but significantly different. Evolutionary biology is overused as justification for human behavior. We were not "designed" to eat meat because we were not designed. We evolved the capacity to eat meat just as we evolved a capacity for sympathy/empathy. Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise.

deltaonefour 5y ago
>Evolutionary biology is overused as justification for human behavior. Let me get one thing straight. I am not justifying anything. My angle is, what's the point? Don't justify anything at all. We're evil for killing, so be it. I am looking at it from a completely dispassionate angle. I do not need to somehow merge and mutate my moral framework to make it work with the existing reality. >We were not "designed" to eat meat because we were not designed. Ok we were "designed" by natural selection to eat meat. I am not making a theological argument. > Chasing an animal down, killing it, and eating it is in my opinion a significantly different activity than subjecting it to thirty likely-invasive procedures over the course of its life and then continuing to perform experiments on its dead body. Not saying it's more or less morally questionable, but significantly different. In the wild, carnivores devour the flesh of their prey while it is alive and awake. Possibly more significant if not equal in being morally questionable. >Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise. No it is not. But what is surprising is that this empathy is the dominant behavior to our own evolutionary detriment (however mild). Empathy evolved to aid in survival of our genome, but when empathy evolves to the point where we are unable experiment on animals to assist in helping our own species... that is something unnatural.
- _nothing 5y ago
  I think we're on the same page in believing that there's not an inherent morality to these behaviors. I'm not accusing of you to try to justify some morally evil act. The comment you originally replied to said this: > Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature To which you replied: > It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat. > The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things. What I was responding to was the claim that because we evolved the capacity to eat meat, we should naturally be dispassionate to the killing of animals. What I'm saying is that since we evolved both the capacity for carnivory and sympathy, that our capacity for eating animals does not make our sympathy for animals at all unnatural. It's not unnatural for us to want to kill animals for our survival. But it's also not unnatural for us to care about and feel sympathy towards animals. I feel that you've been using our capacity for meat-eating to deem vegetarianism, sympathy towards animals, etc. as against our nature. With that, the point of my differentiating between the act of hunting and eating animals versus experimenting with them and their dead bodies is comparable to the difference in severity of humans fighting each other versus torturing each other. Humans clearly have the capacity for both, and yet one typically elicits a higher negative reaction in people than the other. Our ability to empathize with all sorts of pain falls along such an axis. Edit: To your last point, if people naturally develop an empathy towards animals so strong that it overrides their own sense of self-preservation, why is that unnatural? Is a human giving their life to save other humans unnatural? That's exactly why I keep repeating that there is no "design" - or if you'd prefer, "intent". There is no rule in nature that says species are supposed to prioritize the survival of their own, and so deviating from that nonexistent rule is not unnatural. If experimenting on animals is absolutely necessary to humanity's survival and humanity one day refuses, it will simply die out like millions of species before it. Going extinct isn't unnatural either.

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conradev 5y ago

That is like saying biologically speaking, 65% of the world’s population isn’t designed to drink milk, because they don’t produce the enzyme lactase. Yes, it is true. No, it does not mean anything on its own. Those same moral philosophies stop us from killing each other for sport, even though it is in our “savage nature”. Meat consumption is ultimately driven by consumer choice, and consumers will choose what they want to eat

riversflow 5y ago

> Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to develop moral "philosophies" You've got it backwards; Human's current abundance is the creation of human cooperation, which doesn't really work without some sort of ethical framework. Philosophy enables us to achieve more, it is not the result of our achievement.

krageon 5y ago
A dictatorship is a human cooperation as well and while it technically has an ethical framework it's not exactly a victory of philosophy.
- Strs2FillMyDrms 5y ago
  "Dicatorship and Cooperation are the same thing, lots of people are telling me this, rigth now!"
deltaonefour 5y ago
In order to achieve the leisure time you need to develop these philosophies you need civilization first. Otherwise you'd be too worried about hunting and gathering to even find the time to think about these things. A very Complex civilization requires what you talk about, but make no mistake; civilization itself came first.
- Sporktacular 5y ago
  That depends how you define civilisation. Margaret Mead said it started the moment people went from abandoning to caring for each other in spite of catastrophic injuries that would have required very long periods of recovery. Someone made the decision to care for another, much less functional person at their own significant expense. Was a philosophical principle behind that or just enlightened self interest? Maybe we have an innate capacity for empathy. Other animals appear to as well.

bayesian_horse 5y ago

You are also designed not to harm your fellow beings. That may sound like a contradiction, but it's just the "fellow beings" parts that is culturally or individually changed. There have been soldiers who went to war who couldn't shoot their enemies, even though they might even have "wanted" to. Compassion seems to be a very fundamental building block of the Human mind.

deltaonefour 5y ago
You are designed to survive. If that survival involves harming people than that is what will occur. You are also designed to fuck a woman and make her pregnant and many men will fulfill this goal at any cost. Hence why rape exists.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  None of that is true. There are stories over stories of Humans refusing to do harm to other Humans even if it means their death. Conditioning Humans to kill other Humans often involves dehumanizing the enemy in order to circumvent that built-in safety measure. Not everybody can just defuse that switch when he needs to. You are ASSuming I am male and heterosexual. You are assuming homosexuality has somehow not evolved naturally or does not play a part in the natural repertoire of Human social structure (spoiler alert: it does, even in terms of procreation). You do not understand sexual desire, which is not about reproduction, even though reproduction can be a side effect (and usually isn't, even without contraception). You do not understand rape and sexual assault which often is not about sex or sexual pleasure.
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    >None of that is true. There are stories over stories of Humans refusing to do harm to other Humans even if it means their death. These people won't exist given enough time and selection pressure. It's the only logical outcome. Additionally given the nature of natural selection it can be said many many of these people don't exist at all. The majority of the world will not do this unless it has some evolutionary benefit. And that benefit only exists among our genetic progeny. Parents will sacrifice themselves for their kids because of the evolutionary benefit. >You are ASSuming I am male and heterosexual. You are assuming homosexuality has somehow not evolved naturally or does not play a part in the natural repertoire of Human social structure (spoiler alert: it does, even in terms of procreation). You're the ASS here. You can make an argument without throwing an insult. First off I made no assumption about you personally. I also never stated anything about homosexuality. You know what I am? I'm black, I'm trans and lesbian. You're assuming that I'm white, male and straight out of nowhere. Oh how the woke world will destroy you for making such baseless assumptions. Man who cares. >You are assuming homosexuality has somehow not evolved naturally or does not play a part in the natural repertoire of Human social structure I never said I assumed such a thing. I made no statement about this. You made the statement that it DOES play a natural part. I've heard of these arguments. What evidence do you have to support this? I am not talking about logical arguments that illustrate the possibility that homosexuality is an evolved trait. But empirical statistical evidence that show unmistakably that it is an evolved trait. The arguments I hear as it stands sounds a bit convoluted and only shows that homosexuality being an evolved trait is only a theoretical possibility. >You do not understand sexual desire, which is not about reproduction, even though reproduction can be a side effect Ok this is just BS. When did I say sexual desire is only about reproduction? We're done here.

gerash 5y ago

I agree with this take. Chimps kill and eat smaller monkeys all the time. If you watch any nature documentary you can see how ruthless animals are as it's all a survival game after all. I'm no biologist but the empathy / sympathy part also seems to be an evolved trait. It should bring stability to a social group and reduce injuries due to needless in-fighting which effectively ensures better survival as a group.

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Sporktacular 5y ago
"It should bring stability to a social group and reduce injuries due to needless in-fighting which effectively ensures better survival as a group." That's probably how it started, but the definition of social group expanded as we came to realise how arbitrary and culturally determined social group boundaries are. Once we account for those biases, and start to see all animals as just trying to survive in the world, it's a natural progression to extend that empathy to them too.
- gerash 5y ago
  Including all living creatures isn't quite useful in terms of survival chances. Thinking about this topic, we could also philosophize the whole "torture" aspect. Presumably it means physical pain to an animal which many feel uneasy about. But if you think about it, pain, as signals to the brain are also evolved mechanisms in order to survive. Pain is a crude signal indicating that the life of that animal is in danger but they are not perfect indicators. If pain signals were more accurate they would activate the moment an animal approaches a human with a shotgun similar to how you feel pain touching boiling water. But the pain mechanism hasn't become that sophisticated yet. So even the pain is an arbitrary crude mechanism so real "torture" would be loss of habitat for example but animals won't feel that as pain.

nsonha 5y ago

> The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things stupid comment of the year. We kill and eat animals, we sympathize with animals being killed, like where is the contradiction? How about sympathize with animals being killed unnecessarily? (I'm no longer talking about experimenting, just killing in general) How about we kill other human beings in wars, in capital punishment, does that elude having sympathy for them? > Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to... ...kill in excess, bingo

deltaonefour 5y ago
>stupid comment of the year. You call me stupid and yet you're stupid enough to think that I care about anything else you have to say after you call me stupid? Why even bother wasting your breath?
- deleted 5y ago
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kaba0 5y ago

No, we can eat meat but we are by no means obligate carnivores like cats are. A cat will die on a no-meat diet, while we can easily live on plants alone.

Simon_says 5y ago
> we can easily live on plants alone. This has only been true for about the past 50 years, when vitamin B12 was synthesized. There's no plant source for the vitamin. And I'm not even sure the vegans call a vegan diet "easy".
johnisgood 5y ago
No. Lack of meat leads to vitamin B12 deficiency which gives you all sorts of neurological issues. Pretty damn horrible ones. > The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics warns of the risk of vitamin B12 deficiencies in vegetarians and vegans. Vitamin B12 is found naturally only in animal products. A lack of vitamin B12 can lead to anemia and blindness. It can also cause muscle weakness, tingling, and numbness. We might not die, we will just get severely disabled. It pretty much mimics MS.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Algae has plenty of B12. Also, this is a vitamin deficiency, compared to obligate carnivores like cat that can’t digest plants. It is a significant difference between the two.
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    > The usual dietary sources of vitamin B(12) are animal foods, meat, milk, egg, fish, and shellfish. As the intrinsic factor-mediated intestinal absorption system is estimated to be saturated at about 1.5-2.0 microg per meal under physiologic conditions, vitamin B(12) bioavailability significantly decreases with increasing intake of vitamin B(12) per meal. The bioavailability of vitamin B(12) in healthy humans from fish meat, sheep meat, and chicken meat averaged 42%, 56%-89%, and 61%-66%, respectively. Vitamin B(12) in eggs seems to be poorly absorbed (< 9%) relative to other animal food products. In the Dietary Reference Intakes in the United States and Japan, it is assumed that 50% of dietary vitamin B(12) is absorbed by healthy adults with normal gastro-intestinal function. Some plant foods, dried green and purple lavers (nori) contain substantial amounts of vitamin B(12), although other edible algae contained none or only traces of vitamin B(12). Most of the edible blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) used for human supplements predominantly contain pseudovitamin B(12), which is inactive in humans. The edible cyanobacteria are not suitable for use as vitamin B(12) sources, especially in vegans. Fortified breakfast cereals are a particularly valuable source of vitamin B(12) for vegans and elderly people. Production of some vitamin B(12)-enriched vegetables is also being devised.[1] So it seems like that despite them containing substantial amounts of vitamin B12, they are not suitable for use as vitamin B12 sources because they predominantly contain pseudovitamin B12 which is inactive in humans. They recommend fortified breakfast cereals for vegans. What you said about cats inability to digest plants is of no significance here. Vitamin deficiency - especially this particular one - is life-threatening. We need it. We can definitely have plants, and we may need plants as well, but we do need to eat something that contains substantial amounts of non-pseudovitamin B12, which is meat. Of course you can just be a vegan and supplement vitamin B12, but... [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17959839/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17959839/

cheese_goddess 5y ago

Cats are "biologically designed to kill and eat flesh" but have you ever seen what cats do to the animals they capture for food? On the other hand, humans don't, as a rule torture our food and we usually kill our food before we eat it. Not all meat-eating animals have the same kind of behaviour toward their prey. Humans are "biologically designed" to love other animals and care for them. Not in an Elmyra Duff kind of way, but in the way that has allowed us to tame and domesticate the wild ancestors of the animals we still live with. In the same way that our animals have a docile and calm nature that allows them to be domesticated, we have a caring and loving nature that allows us to domesticate them. We are not lions. A lion could not domesticate a flock of sheep. It would just fall on the sheep and slaughter them, on the first day. Without our love for animals, which is just as ingrained into us as our love of eating their flesh, we wouldn't be who we are today, our civilisation wouldn't be what it is today, our bodies and brains wouldn't be what they are today. Those animals have given us so much, and they will continue to give us even more. The least we can do is to treat them with respect and ensure they have a dignified life and a dignified death.

technothrasher 5y ago
> A lion could not domesticate a flock of sheep. It would just fall on the sheep and slaughter them, on the first day. What a simplistic view of lions. I agree that lions don't really have the capacity to domesticate a flock of sheep, but to suggest that they're mindless killing machines that would meaninglessly mass slaughter sheep the first chance they got is weird. They're complicated creatures with rich emotional lives, and I've personally seen them plenty of times pass up opportunities to kill because there was no point. Interestingly, there's also lots of youtube footage of lions and other big cats attempting to care for other animals (albeit typically ineptly).
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  It seems my views are not simplistic enough to not warrant a snotty response from someone who knows so much better. Oh, what tortured lives we simple folk must live...
- 5y ago