I am not sure where you are going with this, but even the above has been argued (though I admit it is the current CW): in reality women gathered various edible plants, nuts, etc. The men wasted their time trying to hunt and on the rare occasion they succeeded, they wasted the meat in rituals and gift-giving. But how this is all germane, I look at further below...
> Hence, only the emergence of the agrarian lifestyle allowed for humans
> to adopt a more grain- and legume-oriented diet. This was a mere +/-
> four hundred generations ago (10000 yrs / 25 yrs). All the evidence I
> have ever heard of suggests that we have the same metabolism as did
> the hunter-gatherers. We have the same teeth (molars for crushing nuts
> and stuff), incisors for tearing flesh. We have the same digestive
> tract; halfway in length between a lion's (a carnivore) and a cow's (a
> ruminant).
Is this a biology is destiny type argument? We share 97% of our genes with chimpanzees, which use a mostly vegetarian diet, supplemented by bugs and such, and a rare monkey hunt. Lets come at it from another angle regarding the presence of certain organs of features: we also have a vermiform appendix, men have nipples, we have a remnant tail. Our spine is ill adapted for our upright style, but fools that we are, we refuse to walk on all fours. And so on. And we are back to Gould vs Dawkins, adaptationism, radical functionalism, Spandrel theories, and so on.
My response (after all that meandering) is that it is not significant what our bodies are or our histories are *except* if they contribute to demonstrating that such body structure or history compels us to a set of choices or actions. And that, I believe, is the original thrust of this discussion.
> And little Ivan -- just as everyone
> else at his station in life -- most definitely requires animal-derived
> food; in fact, that is probably his chief source of sustenance at this
> point, thanks to the good offices of Lisa.
I think I run into a lot of trouble making my point to Westerners because we are looking at very different things, or looking at them in very different ways. For you, perhaps, a vegetarian (including a vegan) is some well-intentioned but confused teenager who feels bad about how poorly animals are treated and eats fries and coke to make a difference. To me, a vegetarian is Uncle Nataraj who lived to 85 and accomplished more in each decade of that life than I have done in all my life.
That you seem too think that a mother nursing her child (the case with our child too, who follows a healthy vegetarian diet, with active encouragement from his paediatrician) violates the principles of vegetarianism (or even veganism), demonstrates this incommensurability, to me.
> The ethical question of whether or not to "kill animals" is just one
> element of a very complex equation. And sorry: I don't believe there
> is any evidence that evolutionary factors favors vegetarianism.
You do not need to feel sorry for me, any more than I should be sanctimonious enough to feel sorry for your "immoral act" of eating animals. I have not claimed (to the best of my memory) that evolutionary factors favour vegetarianism. To a large extent, I think it is irrelevant what evolution favours. Evolution is a blind, slow process that scant meets human needs.
What I have written is that vegetarian groups have evolved a diet that suffices to keep them in good health (and ensure longevity). What that means is not that evolution (Darwinian/biological) resulted in their vegetarianism, but that they have learnt to adjust their diets and consumption, over time, to enhance their health and survival. They have done so without the need for modern science and its terminology (B12, etc), and they have developed a varied choice of food that is no more difficult to obtain than the efforts of your Westerner hunting down his steak and potatoes to go with his Maalox.
It is of course legitimate for someone (such as Ms. Info ;-)) to find it difficult to put together such a diet, or ask for references.
--ravi
-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/