Veggie or Meat Eater?

[Kayleigh]

Originally Posted by Paul mabbott

Sorry to hear about that Beryl.
You can actually get Vit B12 from Marmite and other fungal products *but* pernicious anaemia is not necessarily due to lack of B12 in the diet. There are problems with absorption and the body's production of related compounds. The old treatment for B12/folic acid deficiency was raw liver and raw tripe .... makes the injections look good? It's quite a complex matter but most vegetarians can easily overcome it as long, as you say, they watch out .
Paul M

I also have to have have B12 injections. But I cannot get it from food as mine is due to Crohns disease. I have absorbtion problems. I like liver but if ate it raw I would be put off meat for life I think.

[Alan Hyde]

Veggie to meat eater, Veggie to meat eater, back and forth I go. However, I feel I will end up a vegetarian in the end.
Alan

[willandtracey]

We are both meat eaters - happy to say that i converted tracey from the error of her ways after the first time she met my parents (who had a farm at the time) seven or so years ago... imagine her veggie horror to be sat a table with my mum and dad making polite conversation only to be presented with a wopping great beef stew and then have to listen to my father gas on about which cow it was that we were eating and what she was like etc... (how i laughed, especially as i had forgot to tell the parents about her food fad and she didnt feel like she could say anything!)

By her own admission, she feels much more healthy now she eats a balance of meat and veg.

Someone recently said to me "its not worth eating unless somethings died" and although this was said in jest i have to say if i had a choice of a meat or non meat meal i would opt for the meat in the majority of instances...

[Imaginos]

Originally Posted by matt_xyz

you imply we've stopped evolving....

Just spotted this point. The selection pressure on Homo sapiens is now minimal-survival of the fittest has now become survival of the richest & although often inherited, wealth is not genetic. Thus human evolution in the Darwinian sense no longer happens. There are certain places in the world (the tropics) where there is a case for the presence of natural selection pressures, but as with most natural systems Homo sapiens has mostly divorced him(her)self from the process.

[matt_xyz]

Originally Posted by Imaginos

Just spotted this point. The selection pressure on Homo sapiens is now minimal-survival of the fittest has now become survival of the richest & although often inherited, wealth is not genetic. Thus human evolution in the Darwinian sense no longer happens. There are certain places in the world (the tropics) where there is a case for the presence of natural selection pressures, but as with most natural systems Homo sapiens has mostly divorced him(her)self from the process.

Well we may be into the realms of semantics here. Clearly our tastes, preferences, attitutes towards other species and ability to sustain ourselves on a vegetarian diet have 'evolved'. Hence just because we used to be omnivores needn't mean we all have to remain omnivores. That was the point I was making. Our ancestors didn't have a problem eating meat because they simply had no choice. It was therefore the only option open to them and hence was the natural thing for them to do. We have now developed nutritious vegetarian food, vitamin supplements and so on. The enlightened way in which many of us view other species has also evolved in the sense that it was certainly much less common in past centuries.

However, getting back to the stricter definition of genetic evolution, is it really true that homo sapiens are no longer evolving? Is this a widely accepted viewpoint? I can certainly see why the rate of change would have slowed in the developed world since the majority of death through illness occurs after offspring have been produced (hence not only the 'fittest' genes are being passed on). But I would have thought the rate of change is still positive. In the developing world it must surely still be occuring since the link between ill health and ability to reproduce is still significant.

Also, wealth leads to better nutrition which historically leads to healthier offspring (ignoring the advent of obesity in the West). That's why humans have become so much taller in the West in recent centuries isn't it? Does this count as evolution? Not sure. (I'm no geneticist as you can no doubt tell ).

Matt

[Imaginos]

To quote Prof. Steve Jones in The Single Helix:

"Men have altered rather little in their bodies since they began, although mentally they have shifted beyond recognition. Their relatives, in contrast, have evolved a lot. A single chimp social group in West Africa contains as much genetic diversity as the whole human population - and the difference among groups a hundred miles apart is greater than that between Aboriginals and Icelanders...Evolution depends on differences in the ability to copy genes. If everyone had two, or three, or thirty, children, it could not happen; natural selection can work only when some people have, for genetic reasons, more progeny than others...The Gini index is a statement of the nations divergence in income between top and bottom. The larger the figure the more inequality [and the more inequality the more chance of natural selection playing its role in the poor classes]...Denmark scores 25, Britain 35, the US 40...The global centres of iniquity are in South America, where some countries have a Gini score of over sixty, and in Africa. The economists have pointed to where human evolution will happen; and most will, as ever, take place in the tropics."

If Cro-Magnon man sat down next to you on a train you would not notice much wrong, except for a distinct lack of conversation. Compare this fact with the number of species that have evolved to live alongside man (e.g. house spiders, corncrakes, arable weeds, beet aphids etcetera).
As to the height change in the west, I'm not a geneticist either but I think this is more nurture than nature. If you take two individuals of the same genetic makeup and feed one more than the other, the former will grow bigger, but I'm not sure. As it is, a height change of a couple of percent over a century or more isn't a massive evolutionary shift.
As you say though, just because Homo sapiens evolved as a generalist opportunistic feeder (an omnivore who will eat whatever it can get) doesn't mean that we have to stay so today, we also evolved with hair to cover vulnerable areas, this doesn't mean we should go without clothes.

[Fritillary]

Thus human evolution in the Darwinian sense no longer happens

I think that evolution is still happen. We are not in a spatialship with the same conditions every day. It is probable that in certain things, we are driving the evolution in a different way to the nature does, but we are still under its domain.

In the developing world it must surely still be occuring since the link between ill health and ability to reproduce is still significant.
Althought you can live in a developed country, you must have ancestral aggresivity and a tribal perception if you want to survive. And althought there are a lot of babies living now in England because of advances of medicine, there will be ones that just cannot reproduce themselves because they cannot do it. So genes with faults (to survival, not human caprice), will be still low in the human population.
Developing countries are not too different to developed countries. Of course if you take the extremes, but unfortunately we can found misery everywhere. You can see easily people living at street in London that I dont think they eat meat everyday.

Clearly our tastes, preferences, attitutes towards other species and ability to sustain ourselves on a vegetarian diet have 'evolved'. Hence just because we used to be omnivores needn't mean we all have to remain omnivores. .....We have now developed nutritious vegetarian food, vitamin supplements and so on. The enlightened way in which many of us view other species has also evolved in the sense that it was certainly much less common in past centuries.
Maybe Imaginos and Matz talk about different "evolutions". Evolution is not a question of choice, but of survival. Animals that move from omnivorous to herbivorous or carnivorous, it is a question of survival. The strategy that let them to survive and reproduce themselves, will be the best. With humans, as Matz says, you can choose be vegetarian or omnivorous ( I prefer to say we are omnivorous than carnivorous because I think most of humans like to eat other things besides eating meat)


If Cro-Magnon man sat down next to you on a train you would not notice much wrong, except for a distinct lack of conversation.

But if everyday I take the train nobody talk and that it is normal nowadays, so I am living with Cro Magnon men and I had not realised!!

[Fritillary]

... a little more.

It looks like for you evolution means an obligation to change and it is not that. It is to be prepared to change if it is necessary.

So if human not changes physically it is because we are very prolifics. We have such a reproductive success, so why we are going to change??. But we are arriving at a point where our own intelligence could extinct our species, so maybe we need change for our survival, maybe new humans that being less egoist and more cooperative....
Cockroach and ants have not changed since their apparition on the Earth, much more time ago than humans...... and since they are very resistant, maybe they are going to be here when our species dissapears
Cockroaches are ancient insects having existed very successfully, relatively unchanged, for approximately 400 million years.
http://www.accessexcellence.org/AE/A...cockroach.html

But yes, evolution is the topic for other dicussion...

[nightshade]

I am enjoying more and more vegetables,but organic comes at a huge premium so much so that it seems almost worthwhile to fly them halfway across the world despite the carbon penalty(TIC)