I’m not sure how much I agree with your first paragraph. Darwin’s writing can be quite dense with excessive numbers of clauses, so I may have misinterpreted. But, it seemed to me that he was not conveying that earlier versions of adaptations and organisms are inferior. If he was, I think he was referring to inferiority in terms of an organism’s successful adaptation to an environment. For instance, woodpeckers with longer beaks tend to get more food, and in this sense their adaptations are “superior,” not because there is some innate quality of superiority to having a longer beak, but because it is more successful and is more likely to be past on. If using this definition, any adaptation can be inferior or superior depending on the constraints of the surrounding ecosystem. Evolution DOES tend to improve on adaptations, not because beneficial mutations are really common, but because unsuccessful organisms die off, leaving those who are relatively more successful to reproduce. Also, I don’t believe most mutations are deleterious. My impression is that most have no effect on an organism’s survival. Most variability that occurs makes little difference to an organism’s success until a happenstance change in the environment selects certain individuals and reinforces those variations.

He does use the word “lower” to refer to organisms less successful than humans. He may be implying a sort of evolutionary direction toward “higherness” that doesn’t necessarily happen with evolution, but I can’t say he’s incorrect in conceptualizing species this way. There is degree of accuracy in calling us (or at least our minds) higher than other organisms.

You might be a little bit mistaken in your interpretation of Bayanay. I remember a paragraph where Vitebsky wrote that hunters who took care of their bodies were rewarded with kills by Bayanay. This makes sense, as someone who maintains or builds their strength is probably going to be a better hunter than someone who doesn’t. This is another instance of “perspective reversal” where instead of attributing one’s own volition to what happens them, they attribute it to their environment. Instead of “I am strong, so I killed a reindeer,” they perceived it as, “I am strong, so Bayanay rewarded me with a kill.” At this time, they might not have understood why being athletic or being strong was associated with getting more kills, so they attributed their success to a god instead of to principles of biology and physics that we understand and take for granted.

I agree with pretty much everything you’ve written, as well as the connections you’ve made to the communism-capitalism debate.

I do agree that our society would be better off if people had more awareness and connection to the animals we exploit. Our mindlessness about or indifference toward how our food products come to be is a problem. However, I don’t think this awareness has much change to really come about. Documentaries and policy changes certainly help, but ultimately, in my opinion, the trend the U.S. is toward a complete separation from animal life even beyond what is currently going on. For instance, the synthetic meat we spoke about a few weeks ago. And, frankly, if new technologies like this can give us food that is healthy, I’m all for it, because that means we can let go of our exploitative practices and produce our food without harming animals.

Sorry, correction… we DO need many of the nutrients in milk.

We do not need many of the nutrients in milk, but there are other sources of these nutrients. Calcium, vitamin D, phosphorus, protein, etc. are all essential for us to survive, and milk is a great way to get them. Milk just isn’t the only way to get them. But, for cultures thousands of years ago who went through periods of struggle, having a cow to provide milk was probably life or death.

Agreed. Hilarious video.

Definitely an interesting topic. Makes me wonder if this unloading of our cognitive processes onto automated technologies and clouds will eventually leave us mindless, living blissfully in a world that does everything for us.