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Amadeus Schmidt wrote:

Of course one single vegan would contradict
the statment in that table that humans would
"need" animal protein. They don't.
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Amadeus,

        Isn't that like pointing to a 90-year-old smoker as proof that cigarettes
aren't bad for you?  This seems similar to the logic -- which Ray has
debunked in previous posts -- that allows vegans and vegetarians to put an
"ethical" aura around their diet:  direct, appealing, but ultimately
fallacious.  Unless you are simply interested in playing word games, or
promoting an agenda, the suggestion that "humans [don't] 'need' animal
protein" is akin to suggesting that humans aren't omnivores, but herbivores
who developed an unfortunate bad habit (hunting).  I think history is
against you on this.  You might as well says humans don't "need" love or
companionship or sunshine or sex.  You can always find people who forego an
essential element of human nature, for one reason or another.

        To me, the biggest attraction of Ray's diet -- the focus of this list,
remember? -- as opposed to Atkins or Protein Power etc., is its
philosophical underpinnings.  I am not and never will be sophisticated
enough to judge Ray's "auto-immune" theories concerning Neolithic foods.
But I do think I can understand the concept of (1) assuming that man has a
Nature (in the same way I assume that an objective reality underlies the
world I perceive through my senses); and (2)assuming that what I can divine
of this Nature -- at the very least -- is an appropriate starting point for
evaluating appropriate behavior (in this case, proper diet).  These
assumptions and this approach seems to me to be central to Neanderthin and
to have potential application in a wide variety of human endeavors.  My
guess is that I'm not alone on this list in thinking this way.  Maybe it's
simply a language problem -- your ability to communicate as well as you do
in a non-native tongue is very much to be admired -- but your posts leave
the impression that, contrary to evaluating behavior (diet) through the
prism of Nature, your are evaluating Nature (meat eating) through the prism
of diet (vegetarianism or quasi-vegetarianism).  Trying to communicate from
two such divergent perspectives can be entertaining and even informative
(sort of like a theist debating an atheist), but ultimately it gets you
nowhere.

Robert