>Denis:
>>This, in my view, is a biaised
>>reading of the mushroom episode referred to by Mr TU. Our instinct does
>>protect us, but our curiosity is often stronger than our instinct...
>Kirt:
>And our curious nature is in large part an instinctive mechanism.
>"Defining" instinct and other terms on the fly seems to be a specialty of
>instincto posturing...
I agree defining instinct is not easy to define. Even the chimp's behavior,
which has some intelligent and social patterns, might not be considered as
100% instinctive, but as Burger uses it to justify the consumption of RAF,
let's assume, for the sake of simplicity, that every animal's behavior is
instinctive.
1) Concerning curiosity: according to my personal experience, I believe
that the correct instinctive behavior is to be extremely wary of a new
food. When I was a child, I watched very carefully what kind of food my
parents gave to me, and generally refused for several days to eat an
unknown food. I didn't eat strawberries, cherries and tomatoes until I was
12 years old.
2) Overeating: according to Jane Goodall's book, it seems that chimps really
eat a lot (they can eat several pounds of fruits in a single meal, and
their stools contain a lot of undigested food). But maybe overeating is,
after all, instinctive, because chimps exercise much more than us, and also
because food sometimes becomes scarce?
The trouble is that, when an instincto has to comment about apparent failures
of his method, he often blames overeating (I think there was a lot of trouble
in the instincto community when Burger's wife died of a cancer). Of course,
when a chimp has eaten too many bananas, it might not be willing to walk
several miles and climb on another tree, whereas picking another fruit on
the table is so easy for humans...
3) Selection of food: chimps eat what is available. When fruits on a tree
are ripe, all the members of the community climb on it every day, until
all the fruits have been eaten. When they hunt large animals, they share
their prey: so, they don't choose which kind of meat they eat.
Be(a)st,
Jean-Louis
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