That doesn't explain why cake is more popular than quinoa.
Cake is more attractive as its high in fat and sugar. Rare commodities for a hunter gatherer.
Humans have solved one of those in that they no longer spend all their time starving
That's only true of the last 150 years or so, since we've managed to use fossil fuels as a main driver of agriculture. Previously to that most humans still spent most of their lives in hunger.
Humans have solved one of those
Wasn't the Internet invented to solve the other? 😁
Any animal that evolved not to be delicious to predators (or eliminated its predators, see humans) wouldn’t have pressures of natural selection and would get slower and weaker. Then some other animal would evolve to eat it
I like that. Good work molgrips.
That’s only true of the last 150 years or so, since we’ve managed to use fossil fuels as a main driver of agriculture. Previously to that most humans still spent most of their lives in hunger.
Well yes but there is a difference between hunger and starvation. Animals live in a constant state of starvation, teetering on a thin line between life and death. For a Cheetah, not catching that gazelle now might spell death as you don't know when the next one might come bobbing along. Starvation and the hunt for food totally dominates their lives and behaviour. Humans for most of our time have just been hungry. Quite early on we moved away from hunter gatherer lives - chasing animals around and foraging for fruit, berries and nuts, and created societies to do agriculture, taking our destinies into our own hands, and since then we've not been starving. Hungry yes, but not life or death starving.
But mechanisation really turbocharged things. 100 years ago something like 80% of the worlds population was living in poverty, but now less than 10% of the world is in poverty despite an explosion in the global population. So much progress over the last 100 years in 150,000 year of human history. It's beyond exponential. And now we're in the absurd situation where globally we waste more food than the entire world needed 100 years ago. Hunger for most of us is an attack of the munchies in between meals that are way too large for us...and even that is driven mostly by the boredome of our modern monotonous hum-drum lives. Hence our luxury to indulge ourselves in flavour and preferences. Taste would not even cross the mind of a Cheeta who catches that Gazelle as it buries hits head right into the gut of the animal...it just want to gorge itself as much as possible before the Hyena's come along and steal the carcass from it.
Cannabalism is actually very unhealthy – high risk of spreading diseases.
Kuru being a specific disease. Very similar to CJD, transmission is through eating infected human brain. New Guinea is where it’s found, the Foré people practiced funerary cannibalism, passing the disease along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
When did humans stop being so damn tasty?
People allegedly taste like pigs. This is why whenever I catch a flight I always take honey and pineapple rings in my carry on luggage. If the planes crashing I’m going to eat like a king! Sweet honey glazed humham and pineapple..Mmmmm
Quite early on we moved away from hunter gatherer lives – chasing animals around and foraging for fruit, berries and nuts, and created societies to do agriculture, taking our destinies into our own hands, and since then we’ve not been starving. Hungry yes, but not life or death starving.
No.
We've been hunter-gatherers for pretty much the entire existence of all of the Homo species, from at least 2.4 million YA to only really in the last 100 years that the last groups have died away (or don't rely on H-G 100% of the time), so no not "quite early on" It's only comparatively recently (10-14,000 years) that we've been ploughing and scattering..and it's only more recently still that some rich countries have managed to produce food cheaply enough (fossil fuel and slavery) so that the majority of population isn't hungry/starving or a couple of meals away from them all the time.
Most of the foods described here are only delicious when cooked: cooking food provided a significant advantage as it essentially is pre-digestion and allows humans to consume more calories more easily. It wouldn't be surprising, therefore, if humans have evolved or are conditioned to find (generally) cooked meat and fish appealing.
Raw meat tastes great. Cooking is more important for safety and not having to eat food fresh.
Why do we like foot that’s bad for us and get fat?
Same ‘reason’ as drugs. Not everything has a ‘reason’ as much as a cause.
Natural selection produces all kinds of dead-ends and we are certainly making a gigantic mess of both ourselves and the ecosystem. Luckily we have time to profit even as the party winds down.
The boss of the sugar-factory may be queen bee but the worker bees have diabetes. Luckily for the queen bee, the workers keep breeding which is also good business for the boss of the insulin-factory (current total compensation for CEO of the insulin factory is $54,800,000 )
Likewise, intensive animal farming is just getting into gear. Buckets of fat and sugar will keep the blues away.
Raw meat tastes great. Cooking is more important for safety and not having to eat food fresh.
No. Cooked food is easier chew and easier to digest, and was fundamental to humans developing larger brains.
Most of the foods described here are only delicious when cooked:
Was what I replying to. And it’s not true. Raw food is delicious but impractical… being freed to be able to store and later use a wide variety of food, which with many foods only really works thanks to cooking, gave the human animal a huge advantage over others. I haven’t suggested that cooking wasn’t vital to the advancement of our species.
Raw food is delicious but impractical
You're quite right: I look at a plate of chips and wonder why I couldn't have a raw potato instead.
Most of the foods described here are only delicious when cooked:
Potatoes weren’t mentioned. Thread was about animals. My reply to this comment was explicitly about meat. Although I want raw chillies on my tea now.
Potatoes weren’t mentioned.
You said
Raw food is delicious but impractical
Perhaps you could point me to where you excluded potatoes.
Anyway, my roast chicken tea is ready now. I do think the crispy skin and gravy from the cooking juices are disgusting, though.
I said…
Raw meat tastes great.
And it happens to also be true of a lot of the things humans eat.
the crispy skin and gravy from the cooking juices
Drool…
Oh… no one go trying raw farmed chicken please…
I said…
Raw food is delicious but impractical
Some raw food is delicious and some of it is impractical. On the subject of meat, I'm confident that the majority here are thinking of cooked food.
One of the reasons food tastes good is because making it taste bad is expensive. Plenty of animals are unpalatable, but those that aren't are successful despite being tasty. If you have to put too much energy into making bitter tasting flesh (and with large animals it might be impossible to get enough of the appropriate compounds) then you'll have less for procreation which is the main driver of success.
What puzzles me is that fly's have evolved to make a noise that makes every single person want to kill them then kill them some more and then a bit more still.
What puzzles me is that fly’s have evolved to make a noise that makes every single person want to kill them then kill them some more and then a bit more still.
They've also evolved to be quick enough so you can't.
Also, the things that come into your house and eat stuff that HAVE evolved to be quiet, you don't know about...
That doesn’t explain why cake is more popular than quinoa.
Quinoa is the result of Darwinism
Cake is the result of Intelligent Design. Which is why you get a lot of it sold at church fetes.
Why do we like foot that’s bad for us and get fat?
No food is bad for us. Otherwise it wouldn't be called food. Everything is toxic in the sufficient dose - drink too much water and you'll slip into a coma and die. The foods we think of as bad are in fact very very good as food - lots of important stuff like calories in them. Too much of anything is bad for you - but thats what 'too much' means.
They’ve also evolved to be quick enough so you can’t.
Yes but we've evolved to a point where we can create a spray which allows us to not only kill them but stare right into their many eyes and watch them die as their entire nervous system fires of all their muscles at once and laugh and laugh as they slowly perish.😊
One of the reasons food tastes good is because making it taste bad is expensive.
This sentence has confused me. Why would anyone endeavour to make food taste bad in the first place? Is there a company out there that has invested time and resource in to making food taste as shit as possible and then said “You know what, making this food taste bad is getting expensive, it’s never gonna catch on. How about we make it taste nice instead?”
Or have I just missed something?
This sentence has confused me. Why would anyone endeavour to make food taste bad in the first place?
To deter predators
* edit
Although I’m not convinced that the average Victoriaspongeasaurus would have the requisite amount of Sherlocks to connect their unusual (and lately rather bitter) diet to a corresponding dearth of interested predators.
How does expense play in to that then? Evolution doesn’t have a cost attached. It’s not like a platypus had to handover its life savings to have its offspring taste shitty. I get what you’re saying, but that doesn’t fit with the wording of the sentence I’m referring to
I get what you’re saying, but that doesn’t fit with the wording of the sentence I’m referring to
Well, it was user ‘joat’ that was stating it, I was simply attempting to explain that (at least what I got from it) they weren’t talking about:
a company out there that has invested time and resource in to making food taste as shit as possible
We’re probably on a similar footing regarding cost vs benefit scenarios, although I would imagine that there are examples whereby costs (hardships) are suffered/chosen in exchange for benefits (survival/reproduction). It’s the issue of conscious/voluntary exchanges (as opposed to instinct/happenstance) that I find challenging/unlikely. At least in non-human species. Yet even with our (comparatively) enhanced faculties and (comparatively) limitless/conceptual/existential powers of choice+reason we still somehow (customarily, collectively and frequently) manage to shit the bed and poison the well*
*Which could well be population control?
Cannabalism is actually very unhealthy – high risk of spreading diseases. We may instinctively avoid eating our own species due to natural selection rather than due to cultural conditionin
So is eating meat: I read today that 70% percent of disease comes from animal agriculture, including one some might know called SARS-Covid19. People seem totally ignorant of this, so I guess we'll just stagger into the next pandemic, though perhaps next one will have the death rate of Ebola and the infection rate of measles. Those left standing might well turn to cannibalism.
Seems I started something then buggered off. I think my point has been explained though. There is no thought to evolution, just a retrospective cost/benefit analysis. If what you'd evolved, be it strength, cunning or camouflage, gave you an advantage then you'll pass on your genes. The expense notion is just pointing out that making a being uses resources that have to be balanced against their benefit. You could evolve a million protective spines and never be eaten but they'd be no use if the trade-off was not being able to walk far enough to get food.
That makes sense. The original sentence just threw me for some reason. Then again I think you might be anthropomorphising to a degree. I don’t think taste plays that much of a factor for most predators. They simply eat the prey that lives in the same ecosystem. Some of that prey will evolve defence mechanisms to lessen the chance of being eaten.
maccruiskeen
SubscriberHedgehogs on the other hand,
…… taste a bit like chicken
Posted 7 hours ago
Actuall they taste of pork, hence the name. Hedge because of where they live, hog because of the taste.
To cook one encase it clay and cook it in the hot hot ash of a fire. When the clay baked crack it open and it takes the spines away with it, hedgehog flesh cooked to perfection.
Badgers and foxes open them b rolling them into water, the hedgehog has to uncurl to breath and swim, exposing the soft underbelly to a bite
Marshall Sahlins did metastudy of hunting and gathering societies and found that meat only constituted about 5% of the diet, that they spent less time chasing or gathering dinner than people in the west spend at work and that women did most of the gathering and preparation of food therefore they (and vegetables) were the mainstay of the small scale societies. The genetic variant (from the near east) for digesting milk spread rapidly because groups that had domesticated animals like cows, sheep, goats, could live on the milk and hence inhabit places that were otherwise inhospitable, like Scotland. Milk in this respect was more important than meat. The Neanderthalers were big meat eaters and things didn't go too well for them.
groups that had domesticated animals like cows, sheep, goats, could live on the milk and hence inhabit places that were otherwise inhospitable,
I thought the ability to convert milk to cheese (which can be stored for winter) was a major factor.
Correct, and this combined with the growing of wheat you had a major event in human evolution: the cheese sarnie
hog because of the taste.
Hog because its pig-like snout.
The Neanderthalers were big meat eaters and things didn’t go too well for them.
I think the best evidence suggests that they ate what they could find in their environment. Some (like some Inuit) probably ate very little other than meat, but that's not going to be true of all Neanderthal communities. They probably died out via a combination of competition, violence and sexy times from H Sap.
There's a lot of folk on this thread that don't have a clear understanding of evolution.
A 'clear understanding of evolution' is a bit of a challenge, the more you read the more complex, nuanced and vague it all becomes. The Neanderthalers being a fascinating case in point. Why might people with such good hunting skills succumb to violence? What were relations like with the CrM's given that they left a genetic marker? Absorbtion or expulsion, both? What was their level of social organisation to produce the bone mounds and artefacts? Did they think symbolically? Answers please.
Oh, the comment about evolution was about the sort of comments like the one on flies on page 2...
Why might people with such good hunting skills succumb to violence..?
Numbers probably...mano a mano, I reckon Neanderthals would probs have had an advantage, but the evidence seems to suggest that H Ndals moved in small isolated groups. There's evidence all over the place that H Sap and H Ndals interacted in the same ways that Humans have always interacted, sometimes they fought, sometimes they lived peacefully, they probably assimilated over time. There's some fascinating studies about some of the inherited genetic material that H Ndals passed on.
There's no real way of knowing whether they though symbolically, but there's some evidence of cave painting, jewellery making and perhaps tattooing, some think that things like art demonstrate appreciation of abstract, but there's also been studies that show these objects may have been traded or copied. I think we tend to still look upon H Ndals as "Cavemen Brutes" when they weren't really anything like that, Adam Rutherford likes to use the "Suit on the Underground" test to sort into one's head about how close these humans are to us, and TBH, they'd blend right in...Personally I'd like to think they were just like us.
Note; Cro-magnon is a disused term now
love the fact that everyone has ignored the correct answer from Kerley
kerley
Member
An animal that mutated to taste bad would have better survival chances, no?Evolution doesn’t work in this case. The humans assumptions is that the animals for given breed taste the same. The human only finds out after they have killed one so any less nice ones will not survive more than the nicer ones.
If a normally delicious tree grub had a random mutation to make him taste bitter, it wouldn't make him any less likely to get eaten.... just chewed a bit, but then spat out. The fact that whatever just ate him is less likely to eat one of his mates, actually advantages those without the random mutation.... as they are now less likely to get eaten.
Even if word did spread that the previously delicious grubs were now bad to eat, it would advantage all the grubs equally, and so would not result in any advantage for the ones with the mutation.
Hence animals that are small and poisonous have had to evolve bright colours to warn predators despite being bad to eat.
Mmmmmmmm - delicious grubs
Yep fascinating stuff. I flagged up on earlier threads about having never seen an act of violence against humans in the French and Spanish cave paintings, it all seemed to me about co-operation and the veneration or symbolic influence over their prey. What's replaced 'cro-magnon', this is not my territory.
What’s replaced ‘cro-magnon’
Ah, The slightly less poetic EEMH...Early European Modern Humans. Sometimes also grouped as Archaic Humans. Or just H Sap...Bear in mind that (depending if you're a splitter or grouper) there may have been 3 sub species of H Sapiens; Hom Sap, Hom Sapiens Idaltu, and Us; Hom Sapiens Sapiens...Freaky huh?
I should think they're all represented on here at different times of the day. Did Neanderthalers make bum jokes and insults?
love the fact that everyone has ignored the correct answer from Kerley
When I read it the first time, I couldn't work out what he was saying at all...
Did Neanderthalers make bum jokes and insults?
God I hope so...There's an interesting study that shows that in H-G groups (!Khung Sang and Aka groups) , there's a common behaviour of older members of the group taking the piss of the younger male hunters. "Is that all you could manage to bring us? That won't feed me, let alone a family" etc etc, or if the young hunters starts boasting, there's jokes about his junk.. It's been theorised that it keeps everyone in the pecking order and stops the stronger more capable members taking over...There's no reason to suspect that our early ancestors didn't do the same...
A ‘clear understanding of evolution’ is a bit of a challenge, the more you read the more complex, nuanced and vague it all becomes.
One of the problems with evolutionary psychology is that it explains everything, by definition. Whatever the outcome, that's assumed to have some survival advantage. Problem is, the advantage may not be obvious at all, so it's not really explaining anything. In some cases, pure blind luck may have had a huge role. An asteroid strike, for example, might wipe out all large animals and small rat-like mammals suddenly have an opportunity to take over because all the large predators have suddenly vanished.
