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Old 11-12-2011, 07:17 AM   #944 (permalink)
Guybrush
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tsunami View Post
Can you give me some reasoning why it's written by an idiot?
It's a huge amount of text based on the wrong kind of reasoning (uneducated opinions) and I have better things to do with my time than picking apart the ramblings of ignorants, but yes, I can point out a few things.

Just looking over it, you can see that it is full of unsourced claims and statements. When it does refer, it's to Karl von Linne who was a brilliant scientist, but who died in 1778 and can't, despite his merits, be called an expert on human evolutionary history and historical diets.

When it comes to the proof that humans are not meat eaters, it uses examples like these :

Quote:
Meat-eaters: have claws
Herbivores: no claws
Humans: no claws
I'm a biologist (so is Vegangelica by the way) and anyone who's studied biology will recognize that claws is not a characteristic unique to meat eaters. Contrary to the text saying herbivores don't have claws, there are herbivores, omnivores and carnivores with claws because it's an extremely pratical "tool" to have for many reasons, such as digging through soil for a mole or hanging from a branch for a sloth. It's a very general characteristic possessed by large groups of animals, regardless of whether they eat meat or not. Most birds (you could argue all really) have claws, even the herbivorous ones. The same goes for rodents. So, possessing claws or not does not mean you are a carnivore or a herbivore.

Humans are apes and apes and monkeys can be identified as such for a range of characteristics, one of them being the absence of claws. Instead, we and they have fingers with nails. Nails have evolved from the reptilian claw.

Now, the reason we have nails and not claws is most likely because claws are generally not as good as fingers with nails when brachiating through trees. Our ancestors lived in trees and, through evolution, claws turned into nails. If humans a couple of million years ago started eating meat, they wouldn't evolve back the claw which had been lost. They wouldn't use claws to kill their prey like a tiger might. They would probably scavenge, or, when killing, club or spear animals to death. Hence, using "no claws" as an argument that humans are not "supposed" to eat meat is faulty logic.

Yes we do have a lot of herbivory in our ancestry and yes, that heritage have shaped our bodies. But while our distant cousins chew leaves in the forest, something happened to humans that set us on a different path, to become upright, large headed, small-intestined nomads radiating out into the world from Africa. A change to a meatier diet had a lot to do with that.
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Last edited by Guybrush; 11-12-2011 at 07:28 AM.
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