We need to cook our meat. Animals don’t.
We can’t eat smelly carcasses.
We seem to need a whole lot of antibiotics to fight infections.
We need to wash our hands prior to eating. Animals don’t.
We need to wash our hands after eliminating. Animals don’t.
You get the drift? Why are we humans so fragile?
None of those things is really true.
But we have evolved for some time apparently using some kind of shelter, and lived in pretty balmy environments before that. And there were and are plenty of people who go barefoot and don’t use soap.
<looks up from my sushi and steak tartare dinner> Sorry, what were you saying?
But yeah, like Napier was saying, none of that is really true. You can eat raw meat, not wash, and never use antibiotics (and remember, sulfa drugs, which were the first antibiotics, were only developed in the 1930s. Regular handwashing for antiseptic purposes, and not just to get dirt off the hands, dates to the 19th cetury.)
You can stop doing all that stuff on your list of things people “need” to do. You’ll just be sick more often and not live as long. Just like wild animals, who don’t do any of that stuff, tend to get sick a lot and not live as long as animals in captivity, who are given medical treatment when they’re sick and given disease free food.
Yeah, plus, in many OTHER ways, we’re far less fragile than a slug.
We can eat salted pretzels. Slugs can’t.
We can augment our relatively thin hides with various materials to protect ourselves from physical harm and the environment, animals usually can’t (unless a human does it for them).
We have digital watches. Animals don’t.
Er… far less fragile than animals
We only choose to do or not do those things because our huge brains and opposable thumbs give us the choice.
I think we do these things because our huge brains and opposable thumbs have given us the ability to colonize virtualy every ecosystem across the whole planet. We’ve spread a long way since we arose in Africa. The world’s changed a lot, too, and we’re still everywhere. We can live in places too hot for us by making adaptations to preserve our lives, we can live in places too cold for us the same way, and we can live in places without enough game by taking care of animals so that we have them to eat when we want. Or even just to gaze at and admire.
We also greatly broadened our range of available foodstuffs by figuring out that the application of water and fire to grain turns it edible even after it’s been dried. Prior to that, we had to eat fruit and meat, and grain when it was soft and green. Just as apes do today. And application of fire to meat is optional; it’s for flavor and deterrence of bacteria, not necessity.
By carrying our adaptations with us, and thinking out new ones, we have been able to survive in environments to which we aren’t native, aren’t suited the way animals are suited to their ecosystems. Of course we don’t look as well adapted to any enviroment where we didn’t evolve as animals do who are native to it. For God’s sake, compare an Eskimo to a polar bear; which one has to suit up in furs and manage strange customs to survive, and which one lives naturally in snow? But we didn’t start at the Poles, and you don’t see any polar bears at the equator. We survive anywhere we can. If you saw us in our original native environment, if you could see Lucy the australopithecus in her savannah, you’d see she was as well adapted as any… other… animal. We ARE animals.
Just clever ones.
One of the reasons that gives me the strength to get up in the morning and face another day.
Does the OP mean: Are we less robust than most animals?
No, we don’t. That’s why far northern cultures with an all or nearly all meat diet can survive; they eat the raw meat, which unlike cooked meat has Vitamin C, and therefore survive without vegetable food.
No, but we like aged meat; we are scavengers to a degree. Unlike a vulture our stomach acid isn’t strong enough to sterilize meat that’s seriously rotten.
As pointed out, so does everything else. Our immune systems are actually as strong or stronger than animals, thanks to many generations of city living and the resulting plagues.
We don’t need to; it’s just prudent.
To a degree we aren’t, as others have said. We are actually very durable in some ways; high disease resistance, high endurance, high temperature endurance.
As far as why we are flimsy in other ways, evolution isn’t striving for some goal of a perfected species; it’s about adaption to the environment. With our intelligence we haven’t needed to adapt, and have probably lost some adaptations as well ( note how much weaker than apes we are ).
Our avoidance of low-level run-of-the-mill pathogens is not serving us well, especially the obsessive germophobia of the last 8-10 years (yeesh!). We should spray our kindergartens with farmyard fecal effluvia, not disinfectants.
I like cooked food better than uncooked in general (especially, overwhelming so with meats), but it appears to be a mixed bag of results on whether you get more nutrition from the cooked than the uncooked.
Admittedly we aren’t well equipped to deal with roadkill that’s been fermenting in the sun, but very few creatures are.
Heck, we can even maintain habitats in freaking Antarctica, do they even HAVE anything else living there? Granted, it helps that humans can have fresh food brought in from more hospitable climates and delivered via airplane (on a related note, the Air Force has a really amusing method for delivering fresh eggs via pallete drop…)
Penguins.
I did not know that! But I always wondered why everyone up there didn’t die of scurvy. Thanks!
Um, populations can adapt to doing the things you say humans can’t do. If you get your body used to it, everything except eating spoiled carrion on your list can be tolerated. You might throw up a little more often and catch sick a little more often, but I’ll bet you wild animals get about as sick.
I don’t understand what you mean by fragile. Even though I am a fragile human, I would happily take on a Tyrannosaurus Rex with an Apache helicopter + crew.
We have technological advances and social order that let us live just about anywhere and control all other animals.
Human evolution has traded off a large brain for a smaller, less effective digestive system.
The human brain is large, with multiple cortexes, and we have a large skull (sometimes causing problems in childbirth).
But our digestive system, in comparison to most animals, is small. We have one stomach, cows have four. Our intestines (as a percent of body size) are shorter than a horse or a dog. Most animals have a digestive system that can get nourishment out of feed that humans can’t, and can handle meat that is more decayed than humans can.
Our brain requires a large blood supply and much energy. Therefore less remains for our digestive system. So we have to cook our meat, have it fresh or salt, smoke, or pickle it to preserve it, must process wheat into flour, etc. in order for our weaker digestive system to handle it.
But we get increased intelligence out of the trade-off. Seems to have been effective; humans are mostly dominate over the animal species.
Two points:
I’m amused that the Google ad here is for a dating website for some reason.
This whole conversation reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes.
This doesn’t seem right. Humans are omnivores and can get nourishment from an impressive range of foods. A great many species are specialists - they can eat, say, grass, but have no use for meat.
A body with an energy-hungry brain had better have a digestive system capable of supplying that energy - as humans do.
These are methods of making meat last; they are certainly not essential for digestion.
Stupid brain. :mad:
[/Homer]