[ExI] will raise bugs for food

darren shawn greer dgreer_68 at hotmail.com
Fri Aug 6 19:24:24 UTC 2010



> Examine please: why were they freaking? If they saw an unfamiliar
> bird, would they freak? If they saw some odd unidentifiable soft warm
> furry beast, would they freak? If that warm furry beast had eyes that
> focus forward, like a dog or a human, would they freak more than if the
> eyes were on either side of the head, like a horse or a rabbit? So why
> did they freak at the unusual bug? These were kids, so they likely
> hadn't studied up on poisonous bugs, which are rare."

You likely know my theory on this, from recent posts on this topic. There is a program in their heads, or a series of them likely, formed by adaptive pressures from as far back as the stone age that tells them to avoid unknown species of insects in case they are poisonous. I theorize that it is not JUST because some species of insect are poisonous, but that so many are also actively aggressive. In other words, they bite. Often without warning and because they are small it's hard to defend ourselves from them or even know they are there. And because we don't get to choose which ones crawl on us, we also don't get to choose which might be poisonous.

Bees, hornets, beetles, ticks, spiders, earwigs, ants, mites, horseflies, stump-lifters, fleas, lice, mosquitoes, black flies, centipedes, millipedes. At least two local varieties of butterfly here are poisonous to eat, because they feed on milkweed. Thus, I hazard, the admonition by my parents when I was young not to touch a butterfly in case I 'stopped it from flying.'

At some period, and likely a long one, in our evolutionary history, our likely-hood of staying alive was probably increased by avoiding insects in general and brushing them away in a hurry when we found them on our bodies. I can think of no examples of natural symbiotic relationships between insects and humans, so there would be no benefit to keeping them around even if they didn't bite.

Re: freaking. Because of their own programming, adults often teach children to hate most bugs, so there is a lot of social conditioning conspiring with evolutionary psychology to fuel their reactions.

Last point: I travelled to Japan once and it was the greatest culture shock I have experienced in a lifetime of traveling. The language and the culture there is almost as far as you can get from the culture I hail from.

Perhaps the same thing goes for insects, in a biological context. Those other animals you mentioned? All mammals, except for the bird. Even the word 'beast" conjured up a mammal. Perhaps we recognize, even sub-consciously, an evolutionary kinship with them. Even if you substantially changed features and built a mammalian chimera that kinship might still be strong enough to over-come any initial fear and revulsion. But if you built an insect chimera, especially a big one, we'd all run screaming. Not just the kids.

In summation, insects are fundamentally alien to us. Our science and technology has revealed that in so many ways they are beneficial -- to our environment, as a source of valuable pharmacueticals, as cosmetics and food additives and maybe even someday, as has been suggested here, a major food source. But try telling that to homo-erectus or a little modern-day kid, who are likely to find in them a source of pain, infection, toxin or at the very least a nasty little bite and something too ugly to look at. If occasionally a culture finds nutritional and taste value in one or two, good on 'em. I bet not much else was available and their ancestors got very hungry before they could circumvent the programming in their heads and give it a try.

Of course, we live in a different world now.

But that pesky programming: it still runs. Much of what we think of as objective reality is shaped and formulated by it, in my opinion.

Darren


"Dumb people do dumb things. Smart people do really dumb things."

-- Anonymous






________________________________
> Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 10:00:17 -0700
> From: spike66 at att.net
> To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> Subject: Re: [ExI] will raise bugs for food
>
>
>
> --- On Fri, 8/6/10, darren shawn greer wrote:
>
> Strangely enough, I had the larva for this beast on the side of my
> house last week. My friend's kids pointed it out and were freaking...
>
> Examine please: why were they freaking? If they saw an unfamiliar
> bird, would they freak? If they saw some odd unidentifiable soft warm
> furry beast, would they freak? If that warm furry beast had eyes that
> focus forward, like a dog or a human, would they freak more than if the
> eyes were on either side of the head, like a horse or a rabbit? So why
> did they freak at the unusual bug? These were kids, so they likely
> hadn't studied up on poisonous bugs, which are rare.
>
> Check this:
>
> http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/scitech/2010/08/06/natures-horror-show-ugly-creatures/?test=faces#slide=1
>
> Why does this fall into the category of ugly beasts? It makes my mouth
> water just looking at all that meat.
>
> What do you think of when you see this guy:
>
> http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/scitech/2010/08/06/natures-horror-show-ugly-creatures/?test=faces#slide=2
>
> I think suuuuuushiiiiiii!
>
> For the newer guys, it is an extropian tradition whenever an actual
> gathering takes place to brutally devour sushi to the brink of utter
> extinction. No one demonstrates this better than our own Anders
> Sandberg, the reigning champion of sushi devouring. It is truly a
> sight to behold, in awed admiration.
>
> Slide #2 above is a great example of what we can imagine in future food
> production technology. Clearly this beast doesn't waste much energy
> swimming, as can be seen by her lack of hydrodynamic propulsion
> appendages, but rather survives by "eating whatever drifts in front of
> it." The photo shows some unfortunate beast hanging from the mouth of
> the blobfish, which makes my point perfectly.
>
> We could perhaps genetically modify or just find in nature some insect
> that devours some noxious weed, breed it to absurd numbers, find its
> mating hormone to call it home, give it a night to have fun and lay
> eggs, then collect the remainders to process and feed to the blobfish,
> then pretty soon "...Sandberg, party of twelve, your table is now
> ready..."
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> From: darren shawn greer
> Subject: Re: [ExI] will raise bugs for food
> To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> Date: Friday, August 6, 2010, 4:30 AM
>
>
>
>> Have you ever seen a Regal Moth [1] up close?
>
>
> Strangely enough, I had the larva for this beast on the side of my
> house last week. My friend's kids pointed it out and were freaking. It
> was bright green, seven or eight cms in length, and fat as a good cuban
> cigar. It also had four red-tipped spikes on its foremost segment. We
> looked it up on the 'net and decided it was the larva for a regal moth
> (which I had never heard of until that day.) Coincidence? I think not.
> I suspect Yahweh wants me to breed them for food.
>
>
> Darren
>
>
>
> "Dumb people do dumb things. Smart people do really dumb things."
>
> -- Anonymous
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------
>> Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2010 23:24:30 -0400
>> From:
> msd001 at gmail.com
>> To:
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> Subject: Re: [ExI] will raise bugs for food
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 9:06 PM, darren shawn greer
>> wrote:
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA7QFfnMYPc
>>> Here's a pioneer in the field, though apparently he didn't know much
> about monarchs. Or maybe it was a very original suicide attempt.
>>
>> Have you ever seen a Regal Moth [1] up close? One landed on my
>> building at work; a coworker asked me to verify if this thing was real
>> - see the link below, a moth with a wingspan of 9.5-15.5 cm! Very few
>> of the pictures I could find online have any appreciable scale to
>> imagine so large a moth. I described it as an orange tarantula with
>> wings. The bottom picture on the Wikipedia page gives some scale of
>> the larvae in a human hand. So if Spike is looking for a candidate
>> source for HPG, it won't take many of these fatties to make a filling
>> snack.
>>
>> [1] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citheronia_regalis
>> [2] picture with scale:
>> http://davesgarden.com/guides/bf/showimage/2826/ (#7 of 15)
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