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The unending quest to build a better chicken
- psunavy03 3y ago"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 3y agoEvolutionary 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.
- tempodox 3y agoRight, cave paintings of animal hunts were just an early form of fake news. /s
- rpmisms 3y agoBut cavemen did eat meat. We know this.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThat'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 3y agoWe 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_ 3y agoMaybe 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 3y agoHere's a compendium of similarly-reasoned theories about animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories
- mytailorisrich 3y agoWhat's the point of this comment? To insult without bringing anything to the discussion?
- shermantanktop 3y agoDidn'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.
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- luplex 3y agoThis 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 3y agoWe 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 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-018-9733-8
- someplaceguy 3y agoYup, 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvFixaZdvCg
- rpmisms 3y agoI'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.
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- hombre_fatal 3y agoI guess this reasoning could make sense to you if you never consider what animals eat nor how many habitats are destroyed to farm animals and grow cropland for them. For example, 80% of soy is grown to be fed to animals. A diet of plants causes the fewest animals to be killed: https://animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/ https://animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/ Of course, I don't think anyone who brings up crop deaths actually cares about animals dying since they never change their diet after being corrected. Their motive is to absolve themselves of moral responsibility, not genuine concern for animal lives.
- zer00eyz 3y ago>>> 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_ 3y ago> 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)
- Alpha3031 3y agoMmm yeast flakes and vegemite, yum. I'm not even vegan and I can say that anyone who thinks only animals have B12 is missing out on some good shiit.
- jiehong 3y agoSure, but maybe without going that extreme: it seems like men enjoy red meat much more than women on average. Education or physiology?
- rpmisms 3y agoI'd imagine having more muscle mass makes creatine and taurine (for easy examples) more needed, so more craved.
- righthand 3y ago> 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoI 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-masculinity-beef-cowboys https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/aug/14/beef-american-m...
- kashunstva 3y ago> there's a reason vegans have to bend over backwards to meet their nutritional needs. Having consumed a plant-based diet for the last nearly 30 years, I'm surprised to hear this. Despite not bending over backwards to prepare my meals, my blood lipids and glucose are normal, my measured cardiovascular performance is excellent for age and I have stable to slightly increasing muscle mass. I have no chronic disease and am cognitively unimpaired. While I don't watch omnivores seek out or prepare their food - at least not that closely - I don't think I spend much more effort in the process. > it's not how we evolved We also evolved under very different conditions than those that prevail today. While adhering to the dietary practices that existed in early human development should we also deliberately simulate the conditions that selected for survival? Conditions of extreme scarcity, unpredictable food supply and prevalent hunger would have been typical. It's a mistake, I think, to regard the results of natural selection as absolute best and only possible outcome; they point solely to relative fitness for survival _under the conditions in which those adaptations arose._ Change the prevalent conditions; and it's anyone's guess as to the effect of those adaptations.
- svieira 3y ago"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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(Crichton_novel)
- namphibian 3y ago>The specter of chickens killing us through disease is what first led me into the annals of the industry, and eventually to Peterson. What hope is left, I wanted to know, for those of us who enjoy eating meat? That's a funny sentence given that non-meat eaters will presumably suffer from the next avian flu as much as meat eaters. Edit: though to be generous, maybe the author means it in a more broad sense - what hope is there for meat eating given its various drawbacks. Still, strange sentence imo