Wow! The reactions keep on rolling in! Great: I love talking evolution! I only hope I will keep on having the time to reply to everyone. Thank you for your posts Gary: you saved me quite a bit of time for replies. I only hope that this doesn't evolve in a discussion of evolution vs. creationism. That is not why I put it on this board; there are other boards to discuss that exact topic. Let me react again to the people who posted. Anwar: "You continue to argue from an evolutionary point of view. I was discarding this view in my argument." Evolution is the topic of the discussion I started, so of course I will talk evolution! And you haven't discarded anything; you just said that you didn't believe in it. Anwar: "You didn't argue me on the fact that no known process adds to the genetic code of a species and that all processes which alter the genetic code either damage or destroy it." First of all, I didn't reply to it, because it doesn't invalidate my theory at all. Like you mentioned yourself, only a small part of our total DNA is actually transcribed, so a mutation can easily start including some more DNA to be transcribed, which basically means adding to the genetic code. Secondly, I don't really have enough knowledge to talk about cell genetics; I am specialized in evolutionary biology on population level. But I can tell you of at least one process that is able to add to the genetic code: viruses! Anwar: "How come that you didn't address the otter example either." Because an otter is still a carnivore, whether it is able to crack shells or not. The otter just uses a tool to expand its food sources a little, but it is still just eating meat. So it is irrelevant for the comparison with humans, where the inclusion of tools changed our diets from mainly frugivorous to meat. Stefan: "So you are saying they did not thrive on a diet high in meat and still developed their brain? This is pure nonsense to me. Sorry this discussion is no longer of interest to me." So if I understand it correctly you don't agree with one of my arguments and then you say that this discussion is no longer of interest to you. You could maybe have waited to see if I could have a decent reply to your objection. Or is my way of reasoning making to much sense to you, so you have to protect your ideology with blocking out any information that might change your mind? If you have problems with my theory, come with valid arguments instead of just saying that you are not interested anymore. I thought you said in a previous post to me that expansion is good, narrowing down is not. Why don't you live by what you preach? It is like Gary said: all I am saying is that Beyond Veg is speculating. I am speculating as well, but at least I admit to it, while Beyond Veg is claiming to have "scientific integrity" and has zero tolerance for what they call the party movement or something like that. In my opinion speculating and claiming it to be fact is one of the biggest frauds in science you can be part of. But back to the argument: it doesn't make much sense to assume a causal relationship just because the development of brains and the eating of meat happened at approximately the same time. The increasing brain size can have to do with a lot of things except for nutrition, like the nerve support for the complex bipedal locomotion or, even more likely, to be able to deal with all the extra sensory input from changing climate zones and habitats. I'll bet you that the development for larger brains was already in progress before we started eating meat. Anwar: If Chimps have extended canines and they don't eat much meat, yet we don't (have extended canines) and do eat much meat, doesn't that say that we should have developed them by now? Sorry Anwar, but obviously you didn't understand much of my original post, in which I explained extensively that we have effectively cancelled out most normal natural selection since we started manipulating our environment. I explained that this process might very well have prevented us from getting adapted to cooked foods and eating meat. We are not supposed to eat meat, simply because our biological make-up doesn't support it! Carol: "The likelihood that the growing incidence of junk food eating is the result of the high birth rate among junk food eaters seems to me to be rather slim." Jo said that she expects it to be a trend based on socio-economic factors. I totally agree with both of you. However, I just observed a phenomenon; I didn't try to give an explanation for it. The reason is irrelevant in the "eyes" of natural selection. I think it just makes very clear that some traits can easily prevail in our modern society (for whatever reason), while they are detrimental to our health. It shows again how we alter the normal natural selection process. Carol: "They also developed a huge brain capacity. Why, I wonder?" This is a very good question. Stefan (and Beyond Veg) seem to think that it has to do with the consumption of meat, but I replied to that a bit earlier in this post. I also gave a couple of other possibilities there. All I wanted to say with that information is that our brains became at least so powerful that they enabled our mostly frugivorous ancestors to perform the unique ability to manipulate nature and cancel out a large part of the normal natural selection process. Carol: "So at some point, in order to add this new (enlarged brain) size to the mix, you have to have a mutation." No, this is not true. Mutations are only necessary to develop new traits. If there is a selection pressure to promote larger brains, the smaller brained people will have more chance to die and less chance to breed, which will slowly increase the average brain size. This is the principle behind selective breeding in dogs and a lot of agricultural products as well. Carol: "Anatomical features can become specialized purposes that are quite different from those for which they originally came about, as you mentioned yourself in the antler example." You must have misunderstood me: I never said that the antlers have another function than what they were originally meant for; they are just meant for reproductive purposes. In my second post I explained that there can be three possible reasons for extended canines: eating, defense and reproduction. I deemed the last two unlikely, as I explained there. Carol: "But one of the reasons for being a scavenger and not a killer is precisely because someone has opened up the carcass for you." This is only the case if the animal was killed by predators and that is a minority of the cases. Also, if prehistoric humans would only have carcasses from predator kills to their disposal, they would have an extremely hard time to get access to it, because those carcasses are usually used up extensively and protected viciously by the predators. So a scavenger without claws and extended canines would have a huge selective disadvantage. Carol: "The Purdey theory of Mad Cow is about how rogue prions are created." I have never heard of this theory. Could you please guide me to some info? Jo: "Glad to hear that you were spared from severe detoxification symptoms. Did you experience any at all during your transition? Did you lose weight? How old are you, if you don't mind me asking? I am male of 34. I am rather thin, but that is how I have been my whole life; so I didn't lose any extra weight by going raw. I didn't have any detox during my transition to raw, but in 1994 I had a 3 month experimental fase with only tree fruits, during which a normal little mosquito bite on my finger became hugely infected and caused massive pain. This might have been detoxification. Jo: "My experience was that I gave raw veganism too much time, because it adversely affected my long term health." It is hard for me to say anything about that, since I don't know what you ate and what your background is. Did you take a B12 supplement? (Please everybody: don't come up with me taking a supplement shows that we are not adapted to a raw vegan diet. I have said that our original diet could have included invertebrates and even when that is not the case, the soil on the greens and the insects on the fruit would have given me plenty of B12 in natural circumstances). My motivation to change diet has always been mostly ecologically inspired, I guess probably because I didn't have any health problems anyway. But I still believe that eating vertebrate meat is not part of our biological make-up. The claim that so many people say that they feel much stronger after including RAF doesn't impress me. First of all because I don't know if they had a good diet and secondly because meat might be just another stimulant, comparable to taking steroids: it makes you feel stronger, but is has an adverse effect on your health. Jo: "I can't see how a diet based on high levels of processed sugar wouldn't be harmful for the short term either." I am sure it would be harmful. But that doesn't matter as long as the reproduction is not affected. Best regards, Arjen __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month. http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1