The major lies of vegan/vegetarian pseudoscience.

Okay, my last post took a certain subset of unscientific environmentalism apart, and it’s right-wing corporatism with it. In this post I continue the series on what the real scientists have found, as opposed to the popular views often propagated. My target today is veganism, so I want to start with a disclaimer. There are two sides to veganism (and in fact to vegetarianism) -  a moral decision and a scientific/health theory.

The former is not under debate here. Morality is a personal choice and if you personally believe that you cannot promote any use of animal products, then that is a valid view. If I believe that, since in a stable ecology populations don’t grow and the vast majority of baby animals are destined to be food anyway (for each mating pair, in a stable ecology – only two babies out of their entire lifetime will grow up to breed) – that farming is less cruel than nature, then that is my viewpoint and just as valid.

Where there is room for debate, is on the science side. Is vegetarianism and veganism healthier ? Those who promote it most certainly claim it is, but these claims are scientifically dubious and often just outright wrong – and on this we can have a sensible debate. Your moral beliefs may well (and have every right to) trump it anyway – and that’s perfectly okay, it’s not what I’m talking about here.

So let’s see what the usual veganist story as propagated by PETA says. The claim is that humans are not in fact omnnivores but herbivores, that eating meat and animal products are bad for our health. They support this by indicating that we have small canines – unlike say cat’s and other pure carnivores.
Of course dogs are a lot more omnivoric than cats, and they have bigger canines than us – but they are still mostly carnivore. On the other hand – bovine species and other true herbivores have no canines whatsoever. So that claim is rather dumb, sure our canines are smaller – we were never really teeth-hunters, apes rarely are, we used our hands instead – but we do have them, because we are meat-eaters.

Another thing given as “evidence” of our herbivoric nature is the claim that the great apes are herbivores, they being our closest relatives and with it the claim our evolutionary ancestors (their ancestors too mind you) were aso herbivores. Well is this true ?
Well to answer this, a bit of background is needed, speciation frequently follows a path where species split into a robus and gracile form (that would be a big-strong and a small-fast variety). Robust forms are usually herbivores, gracile can go either way. An Eland is a robust antelope, a springbok is gracile (in this case both are herbivores). A leopard is a robust form, a jaguar is gracile (carnivores here).
Among the apes – gorillas are a herbivoric robust form. Chimpansees (which are much closer to us) come in two varieties. The gracile bonobo (Pan pinuscus) and the robust common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). Both share 97% of our genes… and both of them are omnivoric hunters.
Yep, that’s right – they hunt. They hunt gazelle for meat. They hunt insects all day long. Pan Troglodytes even likes to hunt monkeys (this is not canibalism) – especially baby monkeys which are more tender…

Sorry, the fruit-eating herbivoric chimpanzee is a myth, real chimpanzees eat a good 30% of their diet in meat. The animal today that most lives like our ancestors probably did (in fact most scientists believed it neatly stepped into the niche where we had once been once we moved on) is not in fact an ape, but a monkey – the Southern-African baboon.  Baboons too are hunters, they usually will only take on larger pray like gazelles if it’s very young or injured however. On the other hand, a good 50% of their diet consists of spiders, scorpions and insects (whether it’s meat is debatable but scorpions are definitely not fruit).

Okay, so none of our contemporary relatives are herbivores, in fact try to make a chimpanzee a vegan and you’ll end up with a dead chimpanzee. What about our own ancestors ? Well it turns out that there were many, many homo-somethings over the years, the first thing that really started to be human like, good old Homo-Erectus split up into a whole bunch of sub-species. Many were robust and with one exception all the robust ones were vegetarians (the exception was Homo Neanderthalenses).
Only one gracile line has left any fossils, they were omnivores and the evidence is overwhelming (hunting tools, bones and other evidence of hunting is almost always found along with their fossils). That line, became homo sapience – us.

Along the way, it split up into robust forms several times, each time those robust forms appear to have gone vegetarian as well. What they all have in common is this: they are extinct.
Most of them didn’t hang around for very long either, they’d appear to fill a niche, and die out as soon as the niche went away. Without the adaptability of an omnivore – they were at the mercy of nature, here today, gone tomorrow. These were not tiny guys, they were our robust form… each of the could have knocked Schwarzeneggers block off without any effort… they were huge, strong and powerful without many natural enemies… but without the ability to supplement their diets with meat, the slightest change in climate would starve them.

The exceptional robust form was the Neanderthals. They were exceptional because, like their cousins the homo sapience, they were omnivores. They were much stronger than us, and at least as intelligent. They outlasted all the other robust forms, hanging around until welll after the first homo sapience were here, but ultimately they didn’t make it.
In this case, diet does not seem to have been the deciding factor since they had the same diet as us – and were stronger so they should have been able to beat us for resources.
So why did we win ? Like much of science, we’re not sure, we may have just outbred them. Hell, we may have inbred them. There is however one interesting fact. The fossil record shows that, over their entire existence – the neanderthalls show almost no progress. The hunting tools found among their earliest fossils (around 30 thousand years ago) and those found among their most recent (around 10 thousand years ago, contemporary to early humans getting to their peak) are… identical.
In thirty thousand years, no innovation. No improvement. No progress.

I think we beat them because we had imagination, we didn’t solve a problem once and got stuck – we stayed curious, always looking for better ways. We outperformed them by sheer willpower and that force in us that drove us to land on the moon and explore every corner of this planet we’re on. There is a lot of scientific evidence to support this theory and most paleontologists consider it a likely scenario – and it has something going for it.

So that’s a lot of facts and some theories (I skipped the bits early on which has about 50 different theories and not much supporting evidence yet – and focussed on what we’re almost entirely sure off) – but the message is clear. Humans didn’t become the dominant species on the planet because we ate meat. We survived to become the dominant species because we ate meat.
Not being herbivores is why we outlived almost all our relatives who tried the other way, they are all extinct – until there was only one left, who also ate meat (we know that Neanderthalls used fire to drive entire packs of Mammoths over cliffs until they crashed to their deaths), we beat them with brains, but if we hadn’t been meat eaters, we’d never have survived long enough to try.

So, in short, it’s just simple provable scientific fact that humans are evolved meat-eaters. The claims against this are not just dubious but outright wrong, they are lies. Science has a core task of protecting us from believing what we want to believe, and confronting us with reality instead. Vegan “science” here is nothing more than wishful thinking.
There is a lot of room for research and debate about how *much* meat we should be eating – many cultures (including my own) probably eat a lot more than is healthy, but that’s a very different thing from claiming we’re natural herbivores who eat meat because of some odd way we twisted our nature…