Book Passage Meme

I'm indulging toomanytribbles this fun little meme thing.

The idea is this. You pick up the nearest book, blog the title and author, turn to page 123, skip to the fifth sentence and transcribe the next three.

You're also supposed to tap 3 other people to do the same.

The book is What Ifs? Of American History, edited by Robert Cowley. I received it as a Christmas present last year and, I have to admit, I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Page 123 is an essay written by Thomas Fleming called The Northwest Conspiracy.

The sentences:

5th:
But Johnson declined to cooperate.

Next 3:
On May 9, the War Department ordered the executions without further delay. By this time, with Morton's help, an appeal had been submitted to the federal district court in Indianapolis. Arrangements were made to forward it swiftly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

OK, that's pretty lousy as I can't offer any illumination on to what it means. So let me pick the next closest book.

It is The Third Culture, edited by John Brockman.

5th:
I think they're so wrapped up in their gene-centered world that they have an incomplete ontology of biological nature.

Next 3:
George Williams was the one who bean taking evolution out of the passive mode and making it active. The translation of this is that organisms are out there competing, and although it looks like they're competing for food, they're competing for the opportunity to leave genes behind. At the reproductive-biology level, it's a good description of nature.

This is Niles Eldredge making a rather benign statement about George Williams and one of his contributions to evolutionary biology. It is sandwiched in between other sentences which criticize Williams, Dawkins and the other "ultra-Darwinists" who predominate the field today, for their heavily emphasis on genes, and their insistence that everything in evolution can be explained and understood on the genetic level. Eldredge claims that their extreme "reductionist" point of view the excludes a lot of consideration of higher levels of biological nature (individual organisms, species, etc.) as well as lower levels (like protein chemistry), which may play an equally important role in evolution.

I really don't have anybody to tap to participate in the meme who I think would be very interested, unfortunately. Except maybe Zithy, maybe mystyang.

Vegetarians

This is response to a journal post by theggreen1's on OkCupid, where he basically asks, "What's the deal with vegetarians? Don't they know we have incisors for a reason? Since virtually all life sustains itself from the death of another creature, the vegetarian 'holier than thou' attitude is completely asinine." I am paraphrasing, but that is the general thrust of it.

This was my response.

For many vegetarians it is not necessarily so much a matter of trying to reduce the net amount of death in the world as it is trying to reduce the amount of animal suffering that results from their eating habits, or because they want to dampen their negative impact on the environment.

The majority of animals raised for eating in the U.S. live out most of their lives in an industrial CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operations), which is about as miserable a "habitats" that you can imagine for these animals, and don't even remotely reflect the animal's natural environment. It's standard procedure, for example, for animals to have their beaks or tails clipped to prevent them from maiming their neighbor animals when they go stir-crazy.

In some cases (particularly in the case of cows), their diet consists of food that they would never touch in nature. Ruminants like cows normally subsist entirely on grass ... in CAFOs, they are fed copious amounts of corn mixed in with their grass, supplemented by various animal fats and heaping quantities of antibiotics (a great way to breed super-germs), because without them and other medical care, their stomachs would explode (well, maybe not quite that dramatic, but with more or less the same consequences).

The other possible motive for adopting a vegetarian lifestyle that I mentioned has to do with sustainability. Growing a monoculture of corn on an industrial farm/plantation just to feed it to animals is hugely inefficient in terms of calories netted vs. calories spent. It's not even a particularly efficient way to produce protein. Add to that these farms and CAFOs tend to pollute the air, consume and pollute the local water supply and rely heavily on the burning of fossil fuel and it is pretty clear that this is ecologically not a very sound way of doing things and will ultimate spell some problems. Eating "lower on the food chain" as vegetarians do alleviates some of these issues.

I'm not a vegetarian myself, so I'm not trying to convert you or anything. I'm just explaining why vegetarians eat the way they do even though nature obviously has "intended" us to function as omnivores. We are well adapted to eating a variety of food and doing so benefits us nutritionally, under normal, or perhaps "natural" circumstances. The additive-laden fast food diet of your average American is no more "natural" than vegetarianism and is almost certainly no more healthy.

If you're wondering where I'm getting all of this, most it comes from the fact that I've recently read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It is a most illuminating book if you're interested in understanding how the food you have come to ingest got to your dinner plate, though most people may feel better off not reading it unless they're willing to go to some lengths to make changes to their diet.