In a recent debate with my boyfriend about the ill-treatment of animals (sparked by my comments on the 'Earthlings' video), he brought up a good point that I had not previously considered..
Is meat necessary for the evolution of the brain?
Is it the protein composition in the meat that pushes the evolution?
Or is it something else in the meat?
((What is it about the meat that causes the evolution?))
If so, then by not eating meat, are we cutting ourselves short of future evolution?
'Meat-eating was essential for human evolution'
excerpt: Milton argues that meat supplied early humans not only with all the essential amino acids, but also with many vitamins, minerals and other nutrients they required, allowing them to exploit marginal, low quality plant foods, like roots - foods that have few nutrients but lots of calories. These calories, or energy, fueled the expansion of the human brain and, in addition, permitted human ancestors to increase in body size while remaining active and social.
"Once animal matter entered the human diet as a dependable staple, the overall nutrient content of plant foods could drop drastically, if need be, so long as the plants supplied plenty of calories for energy," said Milton.
The brain is a relentless consumer of calories, said Milton. It needs glucose 24 hours a day. Animal protein probably did not provide many of those calories, which were more likely to come from carbohydrates, she said.
...
Since plant foods available in the dry and deforested early human environment had become less nutritious, meat was critical for weaned infants, said Milton. She explained that small infants could not have processed enough bulky plant material to get both nutrients for growth and energy for brain development.
'Comparative context of Plio-Pleistocene hominin brain evolution' (a .pdf file from gwu.edu)
Those were the only sources that I found of some reliability (a constant plague when researching online!)...
I'm unsure if this constitutes as a categorical mistake of using evolution to determine ethics. It seems like it is, and seems like it's not...
Obviously evolution cannot determine ethics. But, if meat-eating causes evolution of the brain, then wouldn't that evolution have an (eventual?) effect on ethics?
Am I way off base?
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3 comments:
It's simply a veiled reference to the "necessity defense"; i.e., that meat consumption, while seemingly brutal, is necessary for the survival, good, evolution, health, etc. of humans. You identify one fatal flaw in all such appeals to "the way things are" (or, in the case of our early evolutionary develpment, the way things were) -- it is impossible to derive a normative conclusion (the way things ought to be) from any set of purely descriptive premises (the way things are). An insidious genetic fallacy also surfaces here (the irrelevant appraisal of something based on its origins). Most important, all of these so-called facts of our nature (in particular, that consuming meat is at all necessary) are simply false.
Methinks it would be most beneficial to investigate this 'ought-is' thing...
Methinks you are right again.
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