Veganism/Vegetarianism

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I was vegetarian for a while. I started when I was 12 and continued the diet until I turned 18. I still practice a mostly vegetarian diet, but I don't always avoid meat like I used to. I can honestly say that I feel much better now than I did when I was vegetarian.

Vegetarianism/veganism has always seemed unnatural to me. Humans are meant to eat both meat and veggies. Why bother fighting against nature?

I don't particularly what other people do really, as long as they don't try and guilt trip me over eating a friggen steak or something.

That's a bit of a bold claim. My understanding was that this varies according to species.

It depends on the details of their brain chemistry, which varies from person to person. As a general rule, vasopressin is more important for social behavior in males, and oxytocin is more important for social behavior in females. However, generalizations can be perilous due to variations between individuals. This is one reason that a rigid social structure doesn't actually work and never really has. Even the First Teacher failed here.

Works just fine, but it's easier to understand why if we shift our focus to a game of basketball. When two individuals are playing against each other, both of them are playing "the suitor." If anything serves as "the tit," it's the bouncing ball. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that it would matter whether the suitor were physiologically a male or a female. I know it's a hard concept to grasp, but aspects of courtship behavior and competitive play really are two different adaptations of the same basic phenomenon.

Do you realize that you are saying this to an inveterate fag, ma'am?

Depends on the climate. I would investigate holidays that are associated with extensive barter in hunter-gatherer societies. I understand that the Aborigines of Australia had inter-tribal gatherings at which they recognized the common descent of all of their tribes. I am unsure as to what time of year it was, though.

Anyway, whether or not there is any particular time of year that is particularly unfavorable to the spread of disease is altogether superfluous to the fact that inter-tribal divisiveness year-round interrupted by seasonal fits of more pro-social behavior would be more hygienic than associating freely. In fact, this might actually explain why wolves tend to keep significantly larger territories than they actually need to hunt on. Perhaps it doesn't just hedge against famine, but it might actually reduce the chances of a sudden epidemic wiping out a large population.

You are oversimplifying. It is much more efficient for us to have many hard-wired behaviors that have considerable plasticity in how they are expressed. For example, we set our youth to playing team sports against each other. This is because we can't necessarily shed the hard-wired trait that is associated with inter-tribal feuding, but we CAN shape it into behavior that is less destructive and more pro-social. Otherwise, I think that humans tend to vastly overestimate how intellectual they are.

YES, seriously.

I was talking about both. Inter-tribal clashes are not always bent on extinction. Neighboring tribes who routinely engage in boundary wars often unite when they are confronted with a common threat, human or otherwise. The emotions of dislike between them, during particularly nasty feuds, are genuine enough. However, if they were really bent on one another's extinction, one side would eventually get their way.

The thing is, two neighboring tribes who have been feuding with each other for centuries are more likely to identify with each other than a nearby tribe they've never had any kind of truck with at all.

It is the oldest literary theme in history for feuding tribes to suddenly act like brothers when it's in their mutual interests to do so. It's not disingenuous at all. The fact of the matter is that inter-tribal rivalries are not necessarily a negative aspect of our existence. It's actually a necessary part of a healthy existence for a culture that is living under primitive conditions. It can get out-of-hand because it's not a perfect or infallible adaptation, but tribal feuds are's not the same as the kind of war that is bent on total extinction.

Even within the microcosm of a tribe, individual families have minor feuds. Individuals within families feud over boundaries. It's a normal part of human existence. However, there is sufficient plasticity in the behavior that it can be rendered less destructive. The thing is, that's what we want. We WANT men to compete for a woman's attention by trying to out-do each other at worshiping the ground she walks on. It's far preferable to them trying to prick each other with sharp and pointy things. You can't extinguish the basic instinct, but you can SHAPE IT.

So Democrats and Republicans get along like a happy family, then?

I live in Raleigh. It's not a long drive to Chapel Hill. Tribe Wolfpack and Tribe Tarheel deadly enemies. Us feud many moons. Wolfpack and Tarheel war often. Human beings are hard-wired for this kind of feuding. The thing is, though, we like it that way. We really really like it. I know it sounds strange when I come out and say it, but it actually happens to be the case.

Drinking cow milk IS unnatural. Momma cows make milk for baby cows.

The symbiotic relationship between cattle and humans is as antediluvian as you can get, bro. Northwestern Europeans even have a specific adaptation for digesting lactose during adulthood that affects something like 90 percent of the population. The allele is almost unheard almost everywhere else besides parts of Western Europe where it is slightly less common, just for an idea as to how specific this adaptation is.

ante-what? did i just get called bro?

If people must evolve in order to drink cow milk then that proves drinking it is not natural. I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or not.

It's a term you pick up by being indifferent as to which century your books were written in.

Actually, other lactose tolerance alleles have evolved in two other populations (including one in Africa).
@ squirrel: evolution is the epitome of natural. The fact that the allele not only exists, but has been heavily selected for, shows that drinking milk is not only natural but beneficial in those populations.

But the fact that humans had to evolve in order to adapt to digest lactose proves that it was not natural at one point.

It is still not natural for the cows. Think of the cows.

You know what's natural? Dying from preventable disease.

Naturalistic fallacies suck. Yes, they suck. They really, really do. I eat meat because a combination of meat and vegetables is delicious. The presence of animal products in my diet increases the number of flavors by a million of times. Including milk and specially cheese (which might as well be the cooking phillosopher's stone, thank you very much).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Paleolithic
quote:

Kuhn frames the evolution of gender roles in terms of effeciency in exploiting multiple sources of food. The idea that vasopressin makes men incapable of hanging out with women flies in the face of both archaeological and anthropological data.


evidence, please?


Oh, bull. You're being overly freudian. Not everything is about sex.


Dragging this back to the point of the thread, the ball is more like a rabbit than like a breast.

No, it's just wrong.

No. I was using 'you' in the general, plural sense, though. I have had to hit a few guys to get them over the breasts, but once their eyes are watering from a squashed nose, they generally start treating me as just another person.

*sigh*
The point being, pathogens evolve specifically to take advantage of their hosts' weaknesses. Even if the social structure formed to avoid infection by a certain organism, it or something else would evolve to fit the new paradigm. Viruses and bacteria evolve millions of times faster than humans do, and hundreds of times faster than human culture even today.


You're speculating without data. This is exactly the problem with evo-psych as a branch of what wants to be science: people just make up stories in their heads and then tell them with a sciency frame, and then claim that it's somehow rigorous.


We're basically arguing the age-old inborn vs. learned argument. There are a lot of general human traits - but, for example, not all cultures set their kids at competitive sports. Some set their kids at cooperative games. It is extremely difficult to separate culture from inborn traits, and there's a lot of western/male hubris in pretty much all of the evopsych 'research' that I've ever seen.

It also wasn't natural for us to walk upright at one point.
Modern cow breeds are a far cry from the Aurochs from which they descend. On a purely population-based level, domestic animals have greatly benefited from being associated with humans: cows are here, and the aurochs is extinct.

Yep, East Africa specifically.

And, to what Vex said, yes! And, on the cheese, 10x.

I'm just saying that the dairy industry sucks because it hurts the mother cows emotionally to have their babies taken away from them, they get diseases, and live in awful conditions. Humans are breeding them for their milk which humans shouldn't even be drinking then they get slaughtered and they do not deserve to be treated this way.