Food for Thought

[Mercutio]

First, this article: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleid=0007B7DC-6738-1DC9-AF71809EC588EEDF.

We humans are strange primates.
We walk on two legs, carry around enormous brains and have colonized every corner of the globe. Anthropologists and biologists have long sought to understand how our lineage came to differ so profoundly from the primate norm in these ways, and over the years all manner of hypotheses aimed at explaining each of these oddities have been put forth. But a growing body of evidence indicates that these miscellaneous quirks of humanity in fact have a common thread: they are largely the result of natural selection acting to maximize dietary quality and foraging efficiency. Changes in food availability over time, it seems, strongly influenced our hominid ancestors. Thus, in an evolutionary sense, we are very much what we ate.

An interesting proposition, including the idea that our cooking does not so much come from our humanity, as our humanity comes from our cooking!

I read this article in a compilation just yesterday, and in searching for it online, I found a critique of it: http://www.ecologos.org/fft.htm. I see quite a bit that I have problems with in this article, but hey, I know that I read it second, and may merely be experiencing the effects of belief perseverance. What do you learned people think of the critique?

 

[Amapola]

In the critique, I was most struck by this statement:

Bringing in factual, but totally irrelevant, data to create the illusion of credibility is a common, reprehensible tactic among propagandists.

The author of the critique seems to make many glaring assumptions, one of them being that all humans live in the USA and eat meat from "force-fed" farmed animals who are also given growth hormones and antibiotics.

I would also question the author's assumption that behavior and evolution have nothing to do with each other.