Quote Originally Posted by Jim_Jude View Post
Militant veganism isn't any more "retarded" than people who simply stick whatever they think tastes good in their mouth, with no regard for health, environmental or social implications. In fact, I would say that the later is decidedly more "retarded". As for veg-eaters being stupid, Leonardo da Vinci, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein & a whole bunch of other really smart guys chose to be vegetarian and they didn't suddenly become stupid. The militant vegan mindset is pretty stupid if the vegan doesn't honestly think about the issues but just uses the position to rail against other people so as to feel superior.
The true issues are:
- what diet do we best thrive on
- what diet best serves our society/race
- what diet best serves our environment
The answer to these is a diet that is at least 80% high fiber fruits & vegetables, preferably raw to maximize nutritional gain. This is the diet that best promotes long healthy life. We are omnivores, not carnivores, we ate a lot of meat while moving out of east Africa and populating the world, much more than other primates (it's easier to eat cooked animal muscle tissue & safe organs than to test every single plant & fruit for possible poisonous effects while living migratory or nomadic lives). Other primates who were primarily carnivorous, such as Neanderthal, didn't last & they were much more geared to thrive on a high-meat/protein diet. Eating a little meat is fine, for the individual, for society & for the environment. Eating too much meat, however, simply because it tastes good... now that is "retarded".
I agree with the principles behind a lot of what you say here, but you are behind the times in your views on those carnivorous Neanderthals. They didn't die out or "not last." They interbred with homo sapiens to make our ancestors. They were part of our species's history and present day humans carry their DNA (though to varying degrees), according to the consensus of paleogeneticists. So, you may (or may not) want to tweak your dietary estimates to reflect this.

The general point about Neanderthals has been known for a little while now, but further confirmation and detail has been brought out by recent work on Denisovian hominin fossil DNA by a team led by Max Planck Institute biologist Svante Pääbo.

However, looking at the Denisovan genome allowed researchers to discern a greater amount of Neanderthal DNA in Asians and Native Americans than there is in Europeans. This suggests one of two things about how humans spread across the globe. First, it might mean that modern humans coming out of Africa formed families with Neanderthals in Europe, then their children slowly drifted to Asia. There, those mixed children formed families with other groups of Neanderthals in Asia, giving their children a higher percentage of Neanderthal DNA. Eventually, the offspring of these people traveled to the Americas, becoming the founder population for the peoples of North and South America.

A second possibility is that modern humans came to Europe out of Africa in two separate migrations. So they populated Europe, settling down with the Neanderthal locals. But then a new batch of modern humans arrived from Africa. When those new arrivals formed families with the mixed children of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, it gave Europeans slightly more Homo sapiens DNA than other non-African people on Earth have today.

Regardless of what happened as different human groups came together in the lands beyond Africa, one thing remains certain. All of us share some genetic traits that set us apart from our hominin cousins. And a set of those traits could bear directly on how we think. "It makes a lot of sense to speculate that what had happened is about connectivity in the brain, because . . . Neandertals had just as large brains as modern humans had," Pääbo said. "Relative to body size, they had even bit larger brains [than Homo sapiens]. Yet there is, of course, something special in my mind that happens with modern humans. It's sort of this extremely rapid technological cultural development that comes, large societal systems, and so on." In other words, our brains weren't bigger than other hominins' brains. They were just wired differently.
http://io9.com/5939148/new-dna-evide...e-neanderthals