We're equipped to process meat because back when we had to capture our own prey to complement our diet of the local crops and wild plants it gave us an evolutionary advantage. Now we have access to a vegetarian diet that can completely sustain us, yet we're eating more meat than ever, and that's having a negative impact on most people's health.
Human parents have few offspring, but in return there is a big parental investment that allows us to learn a lot during our lifetimes, so our innate knowledge has dwindled. If you put a newborn in sensory/behavioural deprivation, obviously there's nothing for it to learn, but if you were to let it grow up in the world on its own it could easily learn to feed itself. It would probably eat meat.
But then we're not all raising ourselves in the tropical rainforest, we're living in a social environment that allows us to become educated about the consequences of living in that same social environment. If we were wild and depended on meat for survival, I wouldn't be here arguing otherwise.
|