On Tue, 09 May 2006 08:53:12 -0500, William <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Mon, 08 May 2006 20:02:22 -0400, Adam Sroka <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Therefore, what you *think* you know about "millions of years of life"  
>> had to come from somewhere. After all neither you nor anyone you know  
>> was there. Or maybe you are just guessing? There seems to be a lot of  
>> that going on around here.
>
> The record of millions of years is written in our bodies. It is called  
> the immune system, also instinct. I'm not guessing.

Assumptions made by anyone (you, me, whoever) based on the reactions of  
their own immune system do start off as guesswork.  If I have a bad  
reaction to a food, and then I avoid that food, I may believe I have made  
a sound decision based on evidence provided by my own body.  In reality,  
it's a guess.  It may have been an organism or contaminant in the food,  
not the food itself, or it may have been some completely unrelated factor  
(an unrelated infection, for example) that just happened to coincide with  
the timing of the food.  (I can test my assumption by repeated exposure  
while trying to control other factors as much as possible, but then that's  
more like science than it is instinct.)

The other trouble with using the immune system as a guideline is that you  
can really only have feedback on items that cause acute reactions.   
Suppose, for example, that fifty years of eating white flour is going to  
give me a disease.  Yet daily meals with hot dinner rolls have no  
discernible effect on me.  As I sit pondering my meal with the hot rolls,  
I might decide that they are tasty and filling, they don't cause me any  
distress, and so therefore they are OK to eat.  Fifty years later when my  
immune system finally caves and I see the effects of disease, I will not  
be able to connect those two events.

It seems a lot of people here *do* have very acute reactions to various  
foods.  But I'm inclined to think this is more of a food allergy in the  
individual than it is a species-wide evolved rejection of that food, since  
these reactions are the exception, not the norm (even among this list, let  
alone among the general population).  So one person's "instinct" is going  
to tell him something completely different from another person's  
instinct.  That's fine, but if the "record of millions of years" varies  
that much from one individual to another, it's pretty hard to make  
generalized decisions from it.

-- 
   Robert Kesterson
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