Individuals can and do evolve, and then they pass that on to their children, that's how evolution works. Biological evolution is a very long and slow process, technological evolution is not. That's why our teeth are a poor indication of what we should be eating because of this revolutionary thing called cooking. Our teeth are records of our past evolution, not rules for our future or current evolution. The claim that vegetarians have higher rates of cavities is total bullshit. They actually have better dental hygiene.
Individuals do not evolve new genetic features after birth. You will not change your teeth structure genetically in your lifetime, unless if you take up hockey or bare knuckle boxing. Your kids might have a mutation from you that’ll change their teeth, but statistically they won’t.
There’s also an ongoing debate about to what degree humans face evolutionary pressures anymore. Without some selection to pick one mutation over the other, it’s unclear which direction we will evolve.
Teeth are a good record of how the individual evolved to eat, which is indeed in the past. But you have no idea where the evolution will take us, and that’ll take thousands of years, and again individuals do not evolve. So yes, teeth still matter.
I’m glad you have good teeth, but I’ll remind you that anecdotes are not data.
Now you're hopping from evolution to genetic features as though they are the same thing. I never mentioned that I have good teeth or that I was vegetarian, nor is it anecdotal that vegetarians have better dental hygiene. I highly doubt our teeth will change at all because people don't die from lack of a certain tooth. Teeth don't matter when you can literally have all fake teeth and get by eating just fine. In fact, we often remove teeth because we have too many. Again, individuals do evolve, which is not the same as suddenly getting new distinct physical features half way through your life, which actually can happen so you're also wrong about that.
You keep asserting, sans proof, that individuals evolve. Unfortunately for you, the experts disagree[0-2]. Evolution is something that happens to a population, not an individual.
> I highly doubt our teeth will change at all because people don't die from lack of a certain tooth.
Yes, I made this point. But that was not true when humans evolved into our current form, right around when the rest of us evolved. Until relatively recently, humans did die from dental cavities, and we haven't changed significantly in 1,000 years, so the point stands.
> nor is it anecdotal that vegetarians have better dental hygiene.
Which would be a good point if I was trying to claim that. I said they had worse health, which is diet and behavior related.
The big one for me is K2. There is only one vegan source of K2, natto, all other sources are either animal or meat based. K2 is critical for a lot of things, including tooth cells.
Vegans and vegetarians are showing higher rates of tooth decay (not cavities, I misread) than the rest of the population[3]. Doesn't really matter how much they're brushing, it's diet driven.
> Again, individuals do evolve
[Citation needed]
> which is not the same as suddenly getting new distinct physical features half way through your life
You're right that meaningful mutations might be at the protein level, but you're not going to start synthesizing brand new proteins either.
Okay, you're merely arguing semantics with me on evolution. You can call it adaptation or a catalyst for evolution, whatever word you want, but it's still evolution. When applying the theory of evolution to humans, you can't use such a simple definition because we have technology. Additionally, our minds are powerful enough to decide to do things that will cause physiological changes beyond those that one might say would have been caused by natural selection. And how do our minds evolve? Thought, experience, brain processes that we have yet to understand fully which are also directly linked/affected with the rest of our bodies. The evolution of our collective consciousness and knowledge base is the where the real evolution is occurring.
Honestly have no idea what you're saying about teeth anymore, your whole point was that our teeth prove we are meant to have omnivorous diets, which I was arguing against because our teeth are relics just like our nails, they do not matter anymore, so I still don't know how your point stands. They are merely links to our past evolution and what we used to eat 100's of thousands of years ago, long before we discovered cooking which some have linked to a spike in our evolution to our current status.
You literally said "Coincidentally, vegetarians have a higher rate of cavities than the population at large." Cavities are tooth decay btw...not sure why you think they are two different things.
Sorry, but they really don't, and the study you're pushing trying to claim that shit was done on isolated indigenous populations which has nothing to do with vegetarians in the rest of the world who are able to get K2 from plenty of non meat foods like cheese or eggs. More than likely, those isolated tribes are vegan more-so than vegetarian without access to milk-based products or soy beans. Also you get K2 from your gut as well.
> This is just flat out false, anti-science disinformation. Fire suppression as a policy started in the 1930s and actually reverted in the 60's and 70's.
No it's not. I didn't say fire suppression as a policy started then. I said they stopped listening to locals for advice about, primarily, the control burns, and the needs for forest thinning. You are attacking an argument I never made. Strawman fallacy.
But they did allow controlled burns, thats what his link says. So you created a strawman in the scientists.
The 1964
Wilderness Act, Tall Timbers Research Conferences, and Southern Forest Fire Lab
research demonstrated the positive benefits derived from natural and prescribed fire.
As a result, national fire policy began to evolve to address both the economic and
ecological benefits of not aggressively controlling, and even using, fire. In February
1967, the USDA Forest Service permitted leeway for early- and late-season fires. In
1968, the National Park Service changed its policy to recognize the natural role of
fire, allow natural ignitions to run their course under prescribed conditions, and use
prescribed fires to meet management objectives.
I never said they didn't allow control burns at all either. They were stopping them too soon, doing them too little, etc. Which is why I said they stopped listening to locals for input on those policies, not that they stopped them completely. So no, I did no such thing, and in fact, it is you who created the strawman. That seems to be the theme of the day today, because I'm starting to sound like a broken record.
So how do you incentivize/coerce governments and companies to conserve natural resources, not dump toxins into the air, land and water, and generally limit the negative influences on our health and environment?
"A world given over entirely to the engine of industry becomes a world no longer fit for creatures, human or otherwise; it becomes a world without hope." - Tim Winton
There is almost no wilderness left, and what remains is only there because people spent lifetimes working to defend it. I highly encourage anyone who reads this to make a stand in your personal discussions to always choose protecting wild lands over financial gain.
I see the recent attacks on things like the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments to be sabotage, undermining the decades-long efforts of conservationists:
As a native Idahoan I respect opposing arguments but recent trends have gone too far. I heard discussions while growing up that when the national debt reached a certain level, the US government would begin selling off its public lands. So look at who stands to benefit from that and other debts, and you'll see a giant circle of corruption. Meta-level critical thinking is needed now more than ever in these times.
When I was growing up in Oregon the biggest forestry controversy was a halt to logging in national forests to conserve habitat for the endangered Northern Spotted Owl. Outside of the Portland area, it seemed like most news outlets and people were against this intervention. I kind of went along with adult sentiment and thought that the federal government shouldn't destroy our state's logging jobs with their meddling.
As an adult, I have a completely different perspective. Loggers had been cutting down old-growth trees faster than they grow back for generations. If they'd been managing the forests sustainably all along nobody would have forced them to do things differently. Blaming environmentalists and government for the end of old growth logging is like blaming the gas gauge for your empty fuel tank. The underlying resource was depleted and the logging community plan was, apparently, to ensure it ran out completely before changing.
I'm not trying to tell you what happened where you grew up. I'm describing what happened where I grew up. We're both just sharing anecdotes.
The PhDs and environmentalists forced changes on timber communities in the state where I grew up because locals weren't good stewards of the national forests. If the PhDs listened to the timber town Oregon natives, the remaining old growth forest would stay open to logging too, the owls would have lost the last undisturbed habitat, and the post-timber economic cratering would have only been delayed for a bit.
People who have grown up near extractive industries may have a lot of experience of how those industries work that PhDs lack. But people who grow up around extractive industries may also be poor judges of the sustainability of those industries. Anything you grow up with seems "normal" and it's comforting to believe that there's a good, familiar kind of job waiting for you when you grow up. Locals may see things very unclearly when clear vision would reveal big challenges and changes ahead.
Its not that they have to be hard choices. Its rather that we are only commiting to try the easy ones.
And i do agree that what matters is the outcome. I just don't think we are changing the outcome as much as we should be doing given our beneficial position in the world. There are only so many easy "things", for lack of a better word, we can do. The rest are hard. And it seems to me that we are stopping short of committing to doing anything "hard".
I could be wrong about what produces the best outcome with regards the environment considering wether to stopping or continue drilling(edit: in norway). But our carbon emmisions are still climbing while most of the europe that we should be comparing ourselves to has either stopped or reduced their emmisions. We are still not contributing to a carbon negative world other than not being as bad as we could have been.
>But our carbon emmisions are still climbing while most of the europe that we should be comparing ourselves to has either stopped or reduced their emmisions. We are still not contributing to a carbon negative world other than not being as bad as we could have been.
What now? Your emissions have remained flat for the last ten years, you have a carbon tax, your country was one of the first to implement CCS technology [1]. You guys have by no means been sitting on your hands.
I live on the San Francisco peninsula. A mountain lion killed a deer in our back yard once, and then the buzzards came and cleaned it up. Not that I wish to dispute the premise of the OP in the slightest, but you can still find wildness in some unexpected places.
The bias absolutely applies. Vegans care about their health, so they’re likely to do a lot of behaviors that are unambiguously healthy. If someone believes that meat is bad for them and continues to eat it, then they are obviously valuing something else over their health, and are more likely to do other unhealthy things like smoke, drink too much, etc.
I’d be far more interested in comparing vegans to people who believe that meat is good for them and are very health aware. Paleo or Keto individuals would be a good cohort to pick. That would measure technique and not intention, because both paleos and vegans are intending to be healthy.
I’m curious what your results were on low carb. I work out with a cohort of low carb eaters, and we lost an avg of 30lbs when we switched. I personally lost 40, most of it fat (thanks Dexa scan!). I’d also be curious about what your brother cut out from his food supply that helped. Obviously we’re deep into anecdote land at this point though.
I’m dubious about lab grown meat. As previously mentioned in an edit, 84% of the worlds calories are just straight up plants, and it doesn’t seem to be helping much. But if it provides cheaper meat to the masses, I might be persuaded.
I am however very conservative when it comes to introducing new ingredients into the human food supply. I think we’ve done a lot of harm in the past 30 years by adding a lot of seed (sorry, “vegetable”) oils into our food supply. Just because something isn’t acutely toxic doesn’t mean you should be eating it all the time, and I will personally take the exact same approach to lab grown meat. I’ll probably be the last person to switch over, if I ever do.
Edit: it turns out the original study claiming that meat was producing half of the greenhouse gasses was flawed, and the authors had to revise it. The actual number is 3.9% of US emissions, with the rest of agriculture representing 5.1% of US emissions.
Do you have any references for this? I've honestly never heard of cows or cow-like grazing animals living in forests. I've only ever heard of them in grasslands.
To your second point, native biodiversity is definitely destroyed to graze cattle, that happens in the US and everywhere in the world.
I guess in the case of humans we have partly outpaced natural selection - nature hasn't had time to optimise for the reality we are creating, it's too slow. Short term impulses which have worked great (until now) still govern our behaviour.
It's not altruism to try to avert long term disaster beyond your own life span. It's in your own interest to ensure your progeny survives - even several generations in the future they still carry your genes. But I don't know if inbuilt mechanisms for this exist in evolution.
I'd like to think self-inflicted extinction isn't a likely outcome of evolution - but maybe it is once a certain species dominates.
It is curious how carbon based life that existed in the past (dead plants and animals in the form of oil) is the catalyst for carbon based life wiping itself out in the future.
I wonder if this ultimately also happens on other planets with carbon based life (if they exist) - a short period of hyper growth once life learns how to unlock energy from the past, followed by extinction.
I think the ecological issues we're facing are more serious and underappreciated that the overall warming problem. They are linked but ultimately we can survive longer as it gets warmer, just more alone. If you do a search for ecological the result presumes you mean environmental a lot. Pollution, plastics and habitats need very urgent attention as well has CO2/Methane.
It is also one of the big results people are freaking out about the changing climates but stay away from mentioning it much as many don't see it affecting us directly. Technology may drive us enough to replace the untouched wildness essential for nature. I've heard the only large area becoming wilder is Chernobyl and it's hard to think about what's next for Brazil and pretty much everywhere.
We have to consider what's left to be land of the highest value and compensate people (less the 0.1%) who are affected by that decision.
I don't think they're genetically unable to stop, but I think they're genetically predisposed to prefer eating meat if it's an option. I've gone without dairy for a couple of months here and there (while traveling in Asia where it's much less of a thing than at home) and definitely still missed it by the time I got home.
A vegetarian diet often has significantly less protein (important if you're trying to build or maintain muscle mass) and less of some trace nutrients (zinc, iron, vitamin B12) than a diet including meat. It's possible to make up the differences and there are health benefits if you do, but it's definitely more work.
We were talking about wilderness. Biosphere 2 is about way more than that, as it was a completely sealed environment (it had to produce its own oxygen, for a start).
Thinking just of recognizable animals, typical cities have, what, rats, cats, starlings, house sparrows, rock doves, gulls, and not terribly much more. We can do better, but in general cities are not biodiversity hotspots.
We're assuming that evolution has a higher chance of creating biotech that will solve problems than biotech we will be able to produce in the future using computational methods? I doubt it.
39 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] threadIndividuals do not evolve new genetic features after birth. You will not change your teeth structure genetically in your lifetime, unless if you take up hockey or bare knuckle boxing. Your kids might have a mutation from you that’ll change their teeth, but statistically they won’t.
There’s also an ongoing debate about to what degree humans face evolutionary pressures anymore. Without some selection to pick one mutation over the other, it’s unclear which direction we will evolve.
Teeth are a good record of how the individual evolved to eat, which is indeed in the past. But you have no idea where the evolution will take us, and that’ll take thousands of years, and again individuals do not evolve. So yes, teeth still matter.
I’m glad you have good teeth, but I’ll remind you that anecdotes are not data.
> I highly doubt our teeth will change at all because people don't die from lack of a certain tooth.
Yes, I made this point. But that was not true when humans evolved into our current form, right around when the rest of us evolved. Until relatively recently, humans did die from dental cavities, and we haven't changed significantly in 1,000 years, so the point stands.
> nor is it anecdotal that vegetarians have better dental hygiene.
Which would be a good point if I was trying to claim that. I said they had worse health, which is diet and behavior related.
The big one for me is K2. There is only one vegan source of K2, natto, all other sources are either animal or meat based. K2 is critical for a lot of things, including tooth cells.
Vegans and vegetarians are showing higher rates of tooth decay (not cavities, I misread) than the rest of the population[3]. Doesn't really matter how much they're brushing, it's diet driven.
> Again, individuals do evolve
[Citation needed]
> which is not the same as suddenly getting new distinct physical features half way through your life
You're right that meaningful mutations might be at the protein level, but you're not going to start synthesizing brand new proteins either.
0. http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/l...
1. https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq...
2. https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/53371/what-is-me...
3. https://www.deltadentalwa.com/blog/entry/2018/07/vegan-diet-...
Honestly have no idea what you're saying about teeth anymore, your whole point was that our teeth prove we are meant to have omnivorous diets, which I was arguing against because our teeth are relics just like our nails, they do not matter anymore, so I still don't know how your point stands. They are merely links to our past evolution and what we used to eat 100's of thousands of years ago, long before we discovered cooking which some have linked to a spike in our evolution to our current status.
You literally said "Coincidentally, vegetarians have a higher rate of cavities than the population at large." Cavities are tooth decay btw...not sure why you think they are two different things.
Sorry, but they really don't, and the study you're pushing trying to claim that shit was done on isolated indigenous populations which has nothing to do with vegetarians in the rest of the world who are able to get K2 from plenty of non meat foods like cheese or eggs. More than likely, those isolated tribes are vegan more-so than vegetarian without access to milk-based products or soy beans. Also you get K2 from your gut as well.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1492156
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/changing-our-dna-...
Where are your citations for anything you've said?
No it's not. I didn't say fire suppression as a policy started then. I said they stopped listening to locals for advice about, primarily, the control burns, and the needs for forest thinning. You are attacking an argument I never made. Strawman fallacy.
The 1964 Wilderness Act, Tall Timbers Research Conferences, and Southern Forest Fire Lab research demonstrated the positive benefits derived from natural and prescribed fire. As a result, national fire policy began to evolve to address both the economic and ecological benefits of not aggressively controlling, and even using, fire. In February 1967, the USDA Forest Service permitted leeway for early- and late-season fires. In 1968, the National Park Service changed its policy to recognize the natural role of fire, allow natural ignitions to run their course under prescribed conditions, and use prescribed fires to meet management objectives.
" I said they stopped listening to locals for advice about, primarily, the control burns, and the needs for forest thinning."
It doesnt say the need for MORE forest thining. Its says needs for forest thinning, which implies it wasnt happening
"A world given over entirely to the engine of industry becomes a world no longer fit for creatures, human or otherwise; it becomes a world without hope." - Tim Winton
https://media.nature.com/w800/magazine-assets/d41586-018-071...
That's most likely the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness here in Idaho, as well as the various national forests surrounding it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Church–River_of_No_Retur...
There is almost no wilderness left, and what remains is only there because people spent lifetimes working to defend it. I highly encourage anyone who reads this to make a stand in your personal discussions to always choose protecting wild lands over financial gain.
I see the recent attacks on things like the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments to be sabotage, undermining the decades-long efforts of conservationists:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/us/trump-bears-ears.html
As a native Idahoan I respect opposing arguments but recent trends have gone too far. I heard discussions while growing up that when the national debt reached a certain level, the US government would begin selling off its public lands. So look at who stands to benefit from that and other debts, and you'll see a giant circle of corruption. Meta-level critical thinking is needed now more than ever in these times.
As an adult, I have a completely different perspective. Loggers had been cutting down old-growth trees faster than they grow back for generations. If they'd been managing the forests sustainably all along nobody would have forced them to do things differently. Blaming environmentalists and government for the end of old growth logging is like blaming the gas gauge for your empty fuel tank. The underlying resource was depleted and the logging community plan was, apparently, to ensure it ran out completely before changing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_spotted_owl#Controver...
The PhDs and environmentalists forced changes on timber communities in the state where I grew up because locals weren't good stewards of the national forests. If the PhDs listened to the timber town Oregon natives, the remaining old growth forest would stay open to logging too, the owls would have lost the last undisturbed habitat, and the post-timber economic cratering would have only been delayed for a bit.
People who have grown up near extractive industries may have a lot of experience of how those industries work that PhDs lack. But people who grow up around extractive industries may also be poor judges of the sustainability of those industries. Anything you grow up with seems "normal" and it's comforting to believe that there's a good, familiar kind of job waiting for you when you grow up. Locals may see things very unclearly when clear vision would reveal big challenges and changes ahead.
And i do agree that what matters is the outcome. I just don't think we are changing the outcome as much as we should be doing given our beneficial position in the world. There are only so many easy "things", for lack of a better word, we can do. The rest are hard. And it seems to me that we are stopping short of committing to doing anything "hard".
I could be wrong about what produces the best outcome with regards the environment considering wether to stopping or continue drilling(edit: in norway). But our carbon emmisions are still climbing while most of the europe that we should be comparing ourselves to has either stopped or reduced their emmisions. We are still not contributing to a carbon negative world other than not being as bad as we could have been.
What now? Your emissions have remained flat for the last ten years, you have a carbon tax, your country was one of the first to implement CCS technology [1]. You guys have by no means been sitting on your hands.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Norway
I’d be far more interested in comparing vegans to people who believe that meat is good for them and are very health aware. Paleo or Keto individuals would be a good cohort to pick. That would measure technique and not intention, because both paleos and vegans are intending to be healthy.
I’m curious what your results were on low carb. I work out with a cohort of low carb eaters, and we lost an avg of 30lbs when we switched. I personally lost 40, most of it fat (thanks Dexa scan!). I’d also be curious about what your brother cut out from his food supply that helped. Obviously we’re deep into anecdote land at this point though.
I’m dubious about lab grown meat. As previously mentioned in an edit, 84% of the worlds calories are just straight up plants, and it doesn’t seem to be helping much. But if it provides cheaper meat to the masses, I might be persuaded.
I am however very conservative when it comes to introducing new ingredients into the human food supply. I think we’ve done a lot of harm in the past 30 years by adding a lot of seed (sorry, “vegetable”) oils into our food supply. Just because something isn’t acutely toxic doesn’t mean you should be eating it all the time, and I will personally take the exact same approach to lab grown meat. I’ll probably be the last person to switch over, if I ever do.
Edit: it turns out the original study claiming that meat was producing half of the greenhouse gasses was flawed, and the authors had to revise it. The actual number is 3.9% of US emissions, with the rest of agriculture representing 5.1% of US emissions.
Source: https://www.eco-business.com/opinion/yes-eating-meat-affects...
To your second point, native biodiversity is definitely destroyed to graze cattle, that happens in the US and everywhere in the world.
It's not altruism to try to avert long term disaster beyond your own life span. It's in your own interest to ensure your progeny survives - even several generations in the future they still carry your genes. But I don't know if inbuilt mechanisms for this exist in evolution.
I'd like to think self-inflicted extinction isn't a likely outcome of evolution - but maybe it is once a certain species dominates.
I wonder if this ultimately also happens on other planets with carbon based life (if they exist) - a short period of hyper growth once life learns how to unlock energy from the past, followed by extinction.
It is also one of the big results people are freaking out about the changing climates but stay away from mentioning it much as many don't see it affecting us directly. Technology may drive us enough to replace the untouched wildness essential for nature. I've heard the only large area becoming wilder is Chernobyl and it's hard to think about what's next for Brazil and pretty much everywhere.
We have to consider what's left to be land of the highest value and compensate people (less the 0.1%) who are affected by that decision.
This may be of interest https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/21/alaska...
I hope the bears keep tourists away.