discovery health program
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 9:08 am
So here's something I was pondering and wanted to share.
Last night the Discovery Health Channel showed a program about proper diet. Watching it, however, made me realize just how saturated the evolutionary *philosophy* is in the science media.
FOr instacnce, they had a group of people who had a very poor diet live in a zoo and exist on an "evolutionary diet" that was essentially the same as gorillas, mimicking our past, for twelve days. (not even going into the not-so-subtle humans=animals in the zoo aspect....I certainly don't disagree that we are animals physiologically, but from an existence level, we certainly are not...being made in the image of GOd...)
I have a couple of problems with this.
My first problem concerns their reason for examining this diet. They hailed this diet's great points BECAUSE it was based on the evolutionary thinking. Now, I don't disagree with the diet's main premise. Essentially plenty of fruits, vegetables, nuts....low salt, low saturated fats, lots of fiber, etc....but the implication was that we can only gather information about proper diet by "thinking evolutionary". As if we couldn't come up with the proper diet without considering this. And the humurous but sad part is that before this new revolutionary "everything has to be derived from evolutionary patterns", we already had the proper food pyramid mapped out!! There is a HUGE push to make it seem like we cannot examine anything unless we accept and base it on evolutionary history. But this leads to my second issue.
According to the evolutionary model, we would have evolved from a common ancestor (not, by the way, from gorillas or chimps themselves, but from a common ancestor) into a new niche with new behaviors, new dental patterns. So in this new niche, our diets WOULDN"T be the same as the gorilla. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is presumptuous to assume it is the same. Or that the same diet would be the best for us. In their model of human evolution, we did start eating meat. If this was good enough for our ancestors to survive (and survive well enough to beat out the other hominids!), then why return to the gorillas for our eating pattern?!??
ANyway.....thoughts????
Last night the Discovery Health Channel showed a program about proper diet. Watching it, however, made me realize just how saturated the evolutionary *philosophy* is in the science media.
FOr instacnce, they had a group of people who had a very poor diet live in a zoo and exist on an "evolutionary diet" that was essentially the same as gorillas, mimicking our past, for twelve days. (not even going into the not-so-subtle humans=animals in the zoo aspect....I certainly don't disagree that we are animals physiologically, but from an existence level, we certainly are not...being made in the image of GOd...)
I have a couple of problems with this.
My first problem concerns their reason for examining this diet. They hailed this diet's great points BECAUSE it was based on the evolutionary thinking. Now, I don't disagree with the diet's main premise. Essentially plenty of fruits, vegetables, nuts....low salt, low saturated fats, lots of fiber, etc....but the implication was that we can only gather information about proper diet by "thinking evolutionary". As if we couldn't come up with the proper diet without considering this. And the humurous but sad part is that before this new revolutionary "everything has to be derived from evolutionary patterns", we already had the proper food pyramid mapped out!! There is a HUGE push to make it seem like we cannot examine anything unless we accept and base it on evolutionary history. But this leads to my second issue.
According to the evolutionary model, we would have evolved from a common ancestor (not, by the way, from gorillas or chimps themselves, but from a common ancestor) into a new niche with new behaviors, new dental patterns. So in this new niche, our diets WOULDN"T be the same as the gorilla. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is presumptuous to assume it is the same. Or that the same diet would be the best for us. In their model of human evolution, we did start eating meat. If this was good enough for our ancestors to survive (and survive well enough to beat out the other hominids!), then why return to the gorillas for our eating pattern?!??
ANyway.....thoughts????
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