Omnivorous for a Reason

Alert read Therese let me know that unbalanced diets can and do kill.  Soy's okay occasionally, but it does up your estrogen levels.  And it's not nearly as good as a steak.  I like health food, but it is funny how when you go to the Commie food store on MD's campus, the shoppers there don't look especially healthy.  When I was a student I never saw any athletic looking people eating there.  I know some people don't like eating meat, but I think their fundamental mistake is in equating human pain with animal pain.  As Mark Shea pointed out today if we're supposedly just another animal species, then why do we worry things like overpopulation and cruelty?  No other species worries about these things.  (Yeah it's a ramble, but that's what blogs are for)

Comments

[PeterTerp]

I always assumed the general unhealthiness of the Co-op workers was because they were on drugs...but I suppose a lack of protein might be equally explanatory.

From an evolutionary standpoint, I'm sure someone has argued that our concern for overpopulation/ cruelty/ morals/ etc. is merely an adaptive psychology. That is, our minds have evolved like our bodies. Selflessness and benevolence aren't necessarily any more a sign of spirituality than opposable thumbs to an evolution theorist. When primitive instincts for self-preservation "mutated" into an instinct for social-preservation (my own genetic material might not survive but my clan's genetic material will), it turned out to be such a useful trait that those creatures survived and reproduced at a much greater rate. Combine a benevolence instinct with our ability to imagine potential futures, and you have a pretty formidable creature. (If I do this it will improve my clan's survival, if I do that it will hinder their survival.) More complex animals all have a certain degree of imagination (we've all seen dogs dream), we just have the RAM and processors to imagine more scenarios than our less complex cousins. I'm not advocating such an evolutionary theory, but it seems reasonable.

So the concern with overpopulation works from an evolutionary standpoint.
We are taught to share candy fairly early on, and we also learn that if you share across too large a population, no one gets a satisfactory amount of skittles.
So it's just a matter of applying it to the macro-level. If there are too many people, no one will get a satisfactory amount of the resources.
It becomes clear that my clan's genes have a better chance of survival if there are fewer competitors for the resources...Thus, I should convince other clans to stop breeding so heavily.

It would be a stronger argument if I could find an example of a species that slows down its reproduction once it reaches carrying capacity...but I'm speaking out of my field so I can't think of one at the moment. (There are plenty of species that will eat their own young though, which creates a kind of population control.)