Thread: Dairy Free
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Old 01-17-2008, 04:15 AM   #2 (permalink)
sedoniaraqs
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Have you checked out the thread on bhuz.com about milk? Lots of opinions. I guess I'm just repeating myself here, but I know some people are not members of bhuz.

Basically, I think there may be some good reasons to avoid or limit dairy. However, the "milk is only intended for calves" and "we are the only animals that drink other animal's milk" are both logically fallacious arguments.

First, the "milk is only intended for calves, not humans" argument. This is fallacious from a biological perspective because it is essentially mixing apples and oranges. Natural selection has lead to mammals producing milk for their young. It does not follow that this mean that taking and consuming another species' milk is not natural. Natural selection does *not* provide certain organisms for other organisms to eat (except in a few special kinds of symbiosis in which "parts" of an organism are offered to symbiotic mutualist parners; this doesn't apply to us).

Anything we eat deprives a plant, animal, or fungus either of its life or some part of its body or some resource (like honey or milk) that costs it energy. This is the nature of the predator/prey relationship, whether the prey is animal or plant the basic nature of the relationship is the same. Natural selection dictates that any food we can exploit that increases our ability to survive and reproduce is going to be an advantage. Natural selection dictates that if a plant or animal has a feature that helps it avoid getting eaten (a poisonous plant or fast-running animal, for example), then that is going to be an advantage. That many Northern Europeans remain lactose tolerant into adulthood suggests that consuming dairy in cold northern environments has been advantageous and selected for.

The "we are the only mammals that drink other mammal's milk, therefore drinking milk is unnatural" is a fallacious argument because its a non sequitur. The second statement does not follow from the first. There is an almost endless list of things that we do that are pretty much unique in the animal kingdom. Here is a partial list:

We are the only vertebrate animals that do agriculture (I say vertebrate because there are ants that cultivate fungus for food).

We are the only animals that bake bread, brew beer or ferment wine. If other animals want to get drunk, they have to find and eat a bunch of rotting fruit.

We are the only animals that cook food.

We are the only animals that build fires.

We are the only animals that make music or art for the sake of art (this distingishes Homo sapiens from all of our extinct hominid ancestors and relatives also, including the Neandertals).

I used to like pointing out that we are the only species with female orgasm, but someone on bhuz pointed out that some other primates are thought to have this, so I guess this one is out.

But you get the point. And please reread the beginning of my post. I'm not saying there aren't valid reasons to avoid dairy, its just not the ones you mentioned.

Sedonia
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