Kathy Freston recently published a blog on the Huffington Post which argues that “humans are natural vegetarians.” She wants to combat the perception that “eating meat was an essential step in human evolution.” The evidence she cites is actually quite good. She mentions the China Study, noting that substantial genetic modifications only occur over the space of tens of millions of years, and the fact that we are anatomically closest to species (past and present) which are vegetarian.
There are several significant problems, though. What do we mean by “human” and what do we mean by “natural”? Unless we separate out what we mean by all this, the arguments will be endless and unresolvable. And there is one key issue, megafaunal extinctions in the past 100,000 years or so, which can most easily be explained on the basis of the dominance of hunting, and which is very related to human evolution. Continue reading “Are Humans Naturally Vegetarian?”
