Hi Jo,

Your request for references forces me to go somewhere
where I didn't really want to go. I guess it is time
for telling you a bit more about my background and how
my theory came into existence.

I went to university in the Netherlands in Groningen.
The biology department there has a very good name. My
love for nature has always been strong and I was
already at age 6 convinced that I wanted to become a
biologist. I specialized in animal ecology and
evolutionary biology and did really well, because I
loved it. In the later years of my study and in the
contract I had afterwards, I started having doubts
about my specialization and science in general. In
short they have to do with that I feel that a lot of
the "fundamental" science work only has to do with
satisfying curiosity. There is in theory nothing wrong
with that, but when I see that a lot of in my opinion
top priority issues are being ignored for the sake of
satisfying curiosity, I start getting my doubts. This
made me lean more towards a "nature management"
approach to science, because it has a more direct link
to society, but here I noticed that all research (at
least as far as I know) comes down to fighting
symptoms, which just leads to obscuring the problem!
My deep concern for environmental problems made me shy
away from that as well. Further I noticed during my
contract that a lot of scientists are absolutely not
objective: they very often only read in the data what
they want to read in it. This is almost inherent to
science, but it made me realize that for me it is
extremely important to know more about the author, so
I can get a feeling of what his or her prejudices are
(that is one of the reasons I am writing this as
well).

At university I didn't hide my opinion about science.
Since Cum laude is only provided on advise of the
professor and my professor new that I had my doubts
about science and had other plans with my life than
becoming a scientist, I didn't receive my Cum laude,
even though my grades exceeded the minimum
requirements for it. After university I got a contract
for a research project for 2 years for my civil
service (instead of military duty). From the age of 18
on, I had to keep on going with university and my
civil service, since I would have been sent into the
army if I wanted to stop for a year. This made me
extremely eager to travel around after my contract and
I bought a one-way ticket to Australia. I stayed away
for two and a half years, met my American wife on an
organic grape farm in Australia and set off with her
on an overland trip through Asia back to Europe. In
Europe we didn't find what we were looking for and
decided to come to the States, where I have been for 3
years now.

About 9 years ago I became interested in nutrition and
started reading a lot of books on it. I have been
experimenting several times with my diet and started
combining my background in evolutionary biology with
my interest in nutrition. Over the years the theory,
as I posted it on this board, started forming and is
still forming. I was surprised that I couldn't find
anywhere even a simple acknowledgment that humans are
unique in the sense that they are the only species
that are able to manipulate nature to their wishes and
enabling them to live in habitats that are not
suitable to their biological make-up, leading to
serious possibilities for the inhibition of the normal
natural selection process.

I actually do know about Nature's First Law and they
were the little push I needed to go all raw again,
even though I don't like a lot of their work and
wasn't impressed with the history of them on this
board. However, I presented David Wolfe with the
preliminary version of my theory and encountered the
name Ward Nicholson for the first time. I have been
intrigued by the information provided by Beyond Veg,
but started experiencing inconsistencies, logical
errors, slanted information and much more. I had a lot
of problems with their claim of Scientific Integrity,
while I very often observed that they conveniently
ignore references that show an opposite viewpoint to
theirs. My respect for Beyond Veg sank even deeper
when I tried to communicate with them about my theory:
Tom went immediately in attack-mode without giving one
single argument that referred to the content of my
e-mail. And if the theory I try to defend is really a
possibility, it makes a lot of references of Beyond
Veg TOTALLY IRRELEVANT. This refers especially to
references that show that people ate meat during a
certain time of our evolution, assuming that that
means that we should be adapted to it. I explained
extensively in my posts that that is absolutely
nothing more than an assumption!

So here I am on this board with my theory. I really
don't want to sound arrogant about "my theory", but I
thought that my background in evolutionary biology
(not anthropology: I only did one little course in
that) provided me with a "unique" angle to the whole
process (unique in the sense that I have never read
about that possibility before). So my reason for
posting this is that I can fix the weak parts in this
theory, since I am not part of the scientific
community anymore and don't have access to a lot of
literature. So I was hoping that people would come
with valid counter arguments that show mistakes in my
reasoning or guide me to some references in the few
places where I came with information that I needed to
support my theory. But again, my theory is based on
very little facts, but a lot of reasoning about how
natural selection can work and how it definitely
doesn't work. And so far I really haven't had any
arguments that I wouldn't be able to justify in the
light of this theory and I also haven't seen any
references where people say that my claims are false
(except for the one about the age at death for
prehistoric humans, which is really irrelevant anyway,
because I don't think that there is any professional
who will claim that prehistoric humans lived a long
life. And if I'm wrong: please give me references). So
this discussion has so far been pretty disappointing
to me, since I have had to deal with some huge
prejudices and attitudes, and now it is even taken
further away from what I wanted by this request for
references. But if you really want me to, I will read
through my posts again and look at the places where I
actually needed information from references and see if
I can find out where I got it from. I can also provide
you with a list of books I read to build up my
knowledge of evolutionary biology during university (a
couple of other more popular science writers who are
generally pretty good on this subject are Stephen Jay
Gould and Richard Dawkins, especially in "The selfish
gene"). But it is really not where I wanted this
discussion to go.

Hope this clears things up a bit!

Best regards, Arjen




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