[extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ?

[The Avantguardian]

--- Ensel Sharon <user at dhp.com> wrote:
> Do you have more testoterone ?  Are you more
> aggressive ?  Can you reach a
> higher amount of anerobic exertion, like high power
> or strength
> movements?  These all sound like short term
> expedients that have long term
> negative side effects...
> If meat has long term detriments, what are its short
> term expedients?  Why
> did chiefs measure their wealth with it ?  Why do
> people almost
> instinctively crave it ?

I think it is analogous to the genetic concept of
"antagonistic pleiotropy". Although that term
specifically refers to certain genes that confer a
tremendous survival advantage during development but
then turn around and become deleterious in old age.

Examples of such genes are almost all of the so called
oncogenes. You need all these genes to be going full
bore to grow from being a single cell to the trillions
of cells of an adult human. But once you are an adult,
you need to shut these genes down to avoid the runaway
growth known as cancer.

Since natural selection only operates on organisms
during their time-window of reproductive fertility,
evolution rewards those genes, diets, behaviors, etc.
that get you bigger, faster, and stronger in the early
part of your life even if they turn around and kill
you in your later years.

Since by the time eating red meat kills you, you will
probably have had whatever children you are going to
have, natural selection does not penalize this
behavior. Instead it rewards it with greater
reproductive success since eating meat in your youth,
makes you strong enough to escape predators, beat up
your banana-eating rivals, and mate at an earlier age
than otherwise. 

All that being said, if you are done growing, eating
meat probably confers very little advantage unless you
are trying to heal an injury. Of course it still
tastes pretty damn good which is a shame for us
unrepentent carnivores trying to live as long as
possible.



Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us 
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." 

-Galileo Galilei

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