How Cheese, Wheat and Alcohol Shaped Human Evolution
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Oh, yes the glorious battle of englightment- awaking from the beverages of medieval times. If only history was that clear cut.
It turns out coffee send some shizos into revolutionary overdrive, supresses anxiety and thus allows a mumbling bundle, to develop into a paranoia-ignoring, revolutionary zealot, capable to incite others- even though there exist no plan, not strategy and sometimes even quite progressive kings or queens, battling with trader aristocracys who want to keep the peasants uneducated.
TL,DR; New substances have funny side-effects.
PS: Also alcohol is my favourite suspect when it comes to the question- why did humanity settle down? Harvest the wild wheat and move on like a true nomad- or stay and grow it..
Nothing that ingenious and labourfull then a unwillingly sobber alcoholic. But it does not make for nice museum texts:
"Here we see the first settlements- men settled down, because they where thirsty and needed the wheat and barley, and a nomadic existance was cumbersome with all those earthen kegs to move around."
(I follow the plant-based diet)
Not because the pig is dead. I have no bacon if the pig is not dead. But because it's draped over her shoulders like a garland.
Charles Darwin: "There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties . . . The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery."
Leo Tolstoy: "A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral."
Carl Sagan: "Humans–who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals–have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and “animals” is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them–without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us."
Another relevant quote:
Plutarch: “There is nobody that is willing to eat even a lifeless and a dead thing even as it is; so they boil it, and roast it, and alter it by fire and medicines, as it were, changing and quenching the slaughtered gore with thousands of sweet sauces, that the palate being thereby deceived may admit of such uncouth fare.”
Few other animals have any kind of control over fire.
Steak tartare, raw eggs and sashimi are delicious.
I've read somewhere that humankind started as scavengers. As a lover of dry aged meat, I'd wager to say that we not only can eat raw meat we also can eat pretty old raw meat (I prefer my steaks rare).
I suspect raw would be fine if the meat was actually fresh but there's always days between slaughter and plate, so the meat is effectively decomposing by the time we cook.
Another point is that the more you cook red meat, the higher the chance you'll get cancer.
My personal anecdote also tells me that the rarest the steak, the easier the digestion and the greater the benefits (muscle gain, workout performance and appetite control). I usually eat low-carb and near zero grains and cereals though. As always with personal anecdotes, YMMV.
Why do people think non-meat eaters are always self righteous. Does it offend you so much or cause that much dissonance that it leads to feelings of resentment?
Slaughtering or mutilating the plants you raised yourself doesn't look like revering them too much. Looks like just raising them for your own satisfaction of tasting their flavor.
Adding hollow lip service doesn't really seem like an improvement.
True gratitude is not hollow lip service. It should influence behavior.
Sure, It makes no difference to the animal, but maybe it will cause someone to eat less of it or be more supportive of vegans/vegetarian efforts.
This got me thinking... How do we determine which organisms feel pain? Presence of a central nervous system? What about jellyfish or octopi or lobsters? Kingdom animalia? Why not bacteria or plants? They reproduce and have some sort of consciousness. Plants bend towards sunlight.
I used to consider myself Buddhist so I still don’t kill any living beings as a habit... not even mosquitos. But now that I think about it, I have no problems killing bacteria or viruses. I consume a lot of pea protein powder - mainly for aesthetic reasons - am I being unethical?
I absolutely would never eat our brothers/sisters in the hominids and apes/chimpanzees.
I've been growing increasingly concerned about our relationships with and our eating of our first cousins, the other mammals (pigs, cows, etc).
I'm less concerned about our second/third cousins the avian dinosaurs (chicken, turkey), and fish/crustaceans.
I don't worry about distant cousins in the plants, and fungi families.
Bacteria, viruses, insects are pretty far removed from us on the evolutionary family tree.
It's certainly complicated to think of it as a moral spectrum, with no easy/black-and-white answers, but that certainly seems to be the case. At some point I suppose you just have to make rules of thumb, and live with what makes you most comfortable/happy as best you see fit. Minimizing others' suffering is certainly a lofty goal, just don't mistake the perfect of "eliminate all suffering" with the good of "eliminate what suffering I can as best I am able".
I don't get why every site out there thinks I want notifications.
There might be some hidden benefit too, such as with sickle cell and malaria, or more commonly the defective genes are part and parcel of a critical system.
What we have more of an issue is smart people are not having children, or not having as many as they can. The only resource in short supply on the planet is smart people.
Given the current selective pressure against high intelligence it is not too wrong to say it is lethal genetic trait.
http://www.okwave.com/uploads/attachments/post/image_9/27964...
A celiac who continues to eat gluten will not be at their best or healthiest. They will have an uphill battle in life compared to everyone else.
A celiac who stops eating gluten might spend more on food than other people, minorly impacting their life. (Or, maybe they eat more vegetables than average, and thus being celiac becomes an advantage!?)
On a massive population scale, they will on average have some fitness modifier, and their genes will still be selected for or against- just more slowly.
Just think of more severe conditions. There are many once-fatal or severely-debilitating conditions where we've enabled people to survive and possibly even reproduce- but the deck is still heavily stacked against them, and they do not on average tend to have large families with lots of successful kids. So a once-fatal trait becomes less severe, but it's still selected against.
Agriculture was so recent that non-adaptive genes have not been fully removed from the population, nor have adaptive ones (like digesting lactose in adulthood) fully spread through the population. Humans were part way through a massive selective sweep (adaption to agriculture) when the industrial revolution happened. If this had taken 100,000 years rather than 10,000 years then Celiac's would have become almost non-existant.
There's also some research that suggests modern high-gluten wheat varieties have more of the proteins that trigger coeliac disease (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep44609)
I think that's an interesting empirical question. The question is the degree to which their genes propagate vs people without celiac disease. There seems to be a generic component to celiac disease, so obviously the effect can't be strong enough to wipe out the disease (and also worth remembering that there may be positive effects of those genes), but does it actually affect their evolutionary fitness to some degree? (and I think you'd find many people with celiac disease would say that it makes it difficult for them to thrive, in a more everyday use of the term 'thrive')