Having a brain capable of deciding not to eat meat may in fact be due to …. eating meat.
The argument is that our large brains are very expensive, nutritionally, to keep going.
Some other part of the body (with reference to the \”standard\” mammallian blueprint) must have shrunk in terms of the nutrition required to keep it going to allow the brain to take so many resources.
Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, the other expensive bits to keep going, are largely unchangeable given the size of the total animal.
But the gut is changeable. It\’s possible to have an \”expensive\” gut able to process lots of veggies….and cellulose etc, so that grass eating becomes nutritious. Or you can have a cheap gut which cannot process these….and therefore you need to be eating meat as it\’s denser in that nutrition required.
Which leads to the conclusion that you cannot have intelligent herbivores because they need to put so much energy into running their guts that the brain cannot grow large, thus only carnivores or omnivores can become intelligent.
No, this isn\’t an explanation of why vegertarians are dullards: neither that their small brains allow them to get away with it nor that their getting away with it makes their brains small.
But it ought to.
There is no such thing as a balanced vegetarian diet that will grow a human to his full potential or maintain health optimally.
The reason for that is that veg don’t have enough protein and quite a lot of carbs, and unless you get the balance of protein, carbs and fat right you’re living on less than optimal fuel that costs you performance.
Ironically, farmers know this very well, and spent a great deal of time and money on buying fodder for their animals that has been optimised this way.
As for vegetarians being less smart and often somewhat anally retentive and rather full of it — well, as we all know, the hard work of digesting food lowers the IQ somewhat especially when one has to constantly stuff oneself with hard to digest, bulky foods.
*smirkle*
This ties in with a question that’s been bugging me for some time.
In documentaries I’ve seen about our closest relatives, it’s been said that they’re much stronger than us. Chimpanzees have been said to be 3-5 times stronger than an adult male human, and orang-utans 5-7 times stronger.
Something with human intelligence and orang-utan strength would be, in evolutionary terms, very competitive- or so I thought. So I’ve been wondering why we evolved to be so comparatively weak.
It is because being fuel-efficient gave us more advantage than being strong?
I believe our nation was, to a large extent, built upon slavery and imperialism. That don’t make ’em right.
Some relatively short intestined animals, ie bunnies, use a different strategy to handle hard to digest cellulose. They eat their excrement & so pass it through the digestive system twice – effectively doubling its length.
I’d heartily recommend this to vegans. Maybe second time around their diet might improve in taste.