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 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month. http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1