Eating meat; did it give us higher intelligence?

This is done artificially now. In nature it was very rare and only occurred in certain earthquake-prone regions of Central America.

I was wondering about those cows with black and tan spots on the white back. Thanks for the heads up. :-)

Glad to help. Watching all those hours of Animal Planet finally paid off.

see, all that meat has made us smart already

Speaking of eating meat, I just watched a documentary called The Rise of the Warrior Chimps. Tres interesting with lots of food for thought--for me.

In this film the chimps did plenty of hunting, but it wasn't because they were hungry. They used the act of hunting and eating meat as of means of cementing friendships and alliances. They're shown ripping monkeys apart (not my favorite scene) and giving the pieces to other chimps.

I'm still pondering this.

What you partner does or does not eat in no way validates a screed from a vegan source. The point is that such a source is suspect from the outset in claiming that vegetable proteins are superior. That does not take into account that there are proteins available from meat which are not available from vegetable sources. Additionally, while vegans are getting all Pope holy about the superiority of their point of view, they ignore the massaive environmental damage caused by industrial farming methods. Unless the vegans are going out into the backyard to grow their entire year's consumption of vegetables, their dietary sources are a definite liability to the environment.

Oh way to go Builder. You went and made him mad.

It is an interesting situation and full of food for thought.

Many people tend to view eating meat as incompatible with a fully developed state of mind or being, regardless of whether or not it helped lead to the development of a high level of intelligence.

I think the case of cetaceans is a good example. We all know whales and dolphins are among the most intelligent of non-human animals, but for a lot of people the baleen whales or Mysticeti (blue whales, humpback, right whales etc) are perceived in a much different (and more favorable) light than the toothed whales or Odontoceti (sperm whales and all dolphins and porpoises, including the infamous Killer Whale)

Baleen whales are toothless, gentle giants who compose whale song epics, as they roam the oceans thinking deep cetacean thoughts.

Toothed whales are frightening monsters of the deep (e.g. Moby Dick) or perhaps just as frightening, roving packs of sea-wolves who often make a game of battering or tearing their prey apart.

Of course all whales are killers. They are all carnivorous. The difference in their diets is the size and development of their prey. For the Mysticeti, the baleen is an enormous organic filter through which great amounts of sea water pass and in which are trapped the whale's prey, zooplankton. But if you have to be carnivorous, what could be less savage, and less disturbing than subsisting entirely on tiny, even microscopic, primitive animals who have no measurable intelligence and reside at the absolute bottom of the animal food chain? It's the closest thing to a Vegan in the world of carnivores.

On the other flipper are the Odontoceti who want blood with their meat and for those for whom fish is not sufficiently satisfying, there are funny looking but cute penguins, even cuter seals and most horrific of all, their close kin, other cetaceans As with most predators, Killer Whales find the babies among their prey the easiest kills and when they take on an adult whale as a pack will essentially eat their prey alive (or at least until the inflicted wounds and blood loss kills the prey). Hell, even the big cats regularly dispatch their prey by clamping their jaws on the throats of their victims and suffocate them before they start chowing down! Killer Whales obviously deserve their name, and what better proof than the fact that they have often been observed playing with their prey, flinging the poor animal repeatedly through the air before getting down to business.

Of course most experts agree that the behavior of "playing" with prey is a means to teach young Killer Whales how to hunt, and not part of a sadistic Orca game, but it still seems cruel to many of us and especially if the play toy is a baby animal. We want all the cute fluffy rabbits in the world to outrun the fox, the weasel, or the lynx, but we don't want those beautiful creatures to all starve to death. Why can't they become vegetarians!


Probably because the typical dolphin or porpoise eats only fish and has been so popularized by TV and the movies, they are not seen by humans as menacing. They are people loving sea scamps who, after all, just eat fish and there are quite a few humans who avoid eating "meat" but are OK with consuming dumb fish, so close enough.

Much of people's general perception of these animals is based on their perception of the level of threat they present to humans. Conventional wisdom tells us the big gentle baleen whales will leave you alone if you leave them alone

Dolphins are our friends and will even come to our rescue if need be!

We all know what the sperm whale Moby Dick did to the Pequod and it's crew, even though few of use plowed through the unabridged version of the novel, and, of course, Orcas are killers. (One of them not that long ago, out of the blue, killed its long time handler at a Sea World park, by dragging her to the bottom of the tank and causing her to drown. Clever monster!)

So there is, I think, an atavistic fear involved in people's perceptions of these amazing creatures but I think it extends well beyond that to a common perception that what you eat and how you eat it is somehow a reflection of your inner being, your soul, and the greater an animal's intelligence the less forgiving such people tend to be of bloody, violent predation. It's something that goes beyond any ignorance concerning the behaviors of the animal (e.g. "playing" with prey) Movies and TV, with the right formula, can turn monsters into sympathetic characters and "Free Willy" probably helped to soften some views of Orcas, but the first Nat Geo documentary showing a close up of a couple of Killer Whales taking down a blue whale calf would likely harden them right back.

When Chimps were first observed brutally killing monkeys and other small animals and then eating them (not to mention the savage violence of their "wars") it was as if they, like Adam & Eve, had fallen from grace. The idea that these lovable primates who act like us in ways we find entertaining and charming, also were capable of acting like us in ways we might describe as repulsive, disappointed a great many people. The notion that these highly intelligent cousins of ours were not living an almost idyllic life of socialized grooming, primitive tool usage and (with the exception of the occasional ant or termite snack) a vegetarian diet was not something people wanted to accept (Ironically, gorillas who are far more fearsome to the average person, live a lot more closely to that idyllic life than chimps)

Life on earth requires death. They are inseparable. If, by eliminating all aging and disease, we are ever able to crow that we have effectively removed death from the human experience, I'm afraid I feel quite sure that we will find ourselves in a place we never expected, and we'll discover that we didn't banish death at all, we just changed the balance on how it comes to us.

One of the things we prize so much in our humanity is our social behaviors. Family and friends, love and affection, cooperation and assistance, altruism and charity, and when we observe animals living in highly social structures and demonstrating the good side of society we award them points in terms of our regard, because we can better identify with them, but there are well developed theories of social structures having a dark side: Aggression, bullying, discrimination based on social status, conflict and even war, and for many of us, finding this side play out in the animal world amounts to the tainting of noble savages.

Indeed, lots of food for thought.

Firstly, what you meant to say is that there are amino acids available in meat which are not available from vegetable sources.

And secondly, are you sure about that?

. . . because apparently spirulina, quinoa, buckwheat, hempseed, and amaranth, and soybeans are said to have complete proteins.

you cqn thank that brilliant dietician, Gen Douglas MacArthur ,who convinced an entire nation to eat whales.

Paleo humans have really nothing by which we can compare whether "we became smarter for eating meat"
The fact is that the brain's function relies on a large percentage of a standard daily caloric intake. Meat is dense in nutrients as compared to leaves and twigs and fruits. If we notice those apes that rely on vegetal food primarily, they hqve huge guts for processing the nutrients available in vegetation.

Our pre history shows that we scarfed up left overs from the kill of other beasts. We became met scavengers qnd learnt to harvest bone marrow qnd "suck bone"(sorta like a pork bbq without the sauce). As our brains grew and sutured we seemed to be developing skills on tool making that was more in tune with killing other creatures than for growing einkorn.(That came later with the development of settlements).
"Hunter gatherers" qe became. Along with that came specialization which created free time and led to development of settlement and more sophisticated tool making.

We became the apex predator , was it because of meat? I think that meqts nutrient density and vitqmin mixes (B's and C and A), (as well as several unique proteins and amino acids) ws probably a leading factor that assisted our evolution

Vegetable protein sources do not provide all the amino acids. There are twenty amino acids, and there are nine of those we must get from our diet, because our bodies don't produce them. Yes, I'm sure of this. If you don't believe me, I will certainly not lose any sleep over it.

But I just told you that spirulina, quinoa, buckwheat, hempseed, amaranth, and soybeans have complete proteins. Don't you believe that?

We juice a few trays of wheatgrass in one hit, to save time. It's a complete food source, including B12 and lipids. If you leave it for a day to settle, you can see the solids, with the lipids on top, and the ratio is about two to one.

Here's where you get those nine essential amino acids from non-meat sources.

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/natural-health/need-protein-amino-acids-found-abundantly-in-plants/

Well, today we have several options other than chewing. My gal is on a juice fast/feast, and using both the slow, masticating juicer (my fave) and the nutri-bullet style blender that came with our Ninja combo unit (highly recommended).
She's on day 22 of her fast, but not in the least hungry, and quite glowing with health.

No, I don't. I can think of few things less likely to convince me of anything than that you told me. In fact, I've seen veggo sites which acknowledge that veggies and grains don't provide all of the amino acids, and then they claim you don't need 'em.

You just told me . . . ah-hahahahahahahahahahahaha . . .

I can appreciate your desire to keep eating meat, because I continue to be omnivorous myself, but you're long on talk, and short on evidence.

You missed this one?

For every web source such as that, one can find another web source, and by that I mean pro-vegetarian, which talks about not needing all the proteins available from animal sources, or rather dishonestly hedges their bets by including eggs and dairy products in their regime.

Do you know the methodology of your source, or the putative research on which they base their claims? In my experience, many people who make claims are short on evidence.

I didn't make the claim that meat has proteins and amino acids not found in vegetable sources; you did.

I'm asking you for some evidence of your claims. It's that simple.