Veganism Conversation

Recently my good friend, Sara, has become a vegan. We are both very intelligent, analytical people who love to debate issues that we are passionate about. This is one of them that we ended up debating. As a vegan, she believes it is wrong to kill other animals. As an anthropologist, I believe it is natural to kill other animals.

 

Breaking down some the arguments that we proceeded to make there were several vegan arguments that were prominent. Arguments against killing and eating animals were:

1. Killing animals is wrong (The Bible says "Thou shall not kill")
2. Animals have feelings, they are like our brothers and sisters
3. Meat is unnatural for your digestive system, we are not made to be carnivores
4. The Golden Rule: Do onto others as you would have done onto yourself
5. Specism is just as bad as racism

This video by Gary Yourofsky provides the basis for the arguments in which I will examine.

 

 

Disclaimer: As I debate each one of these topics, I am working from my perspective and my knowledge of the topic. There are cultural and historical views to how I see the topic and as I will try my best to interpret the both sides of the argument, I may seem biased in my interpretation because of my own views.

 

First, killing animals is wrong. While this relies heavily on your definition of "wrong" I have to resort to a Christian viewpoint, one in which the Bible states "Thou shall not kill". Now the Bible is taken very literally is some contexts, and not literally in other contexts. While the Bible doesn't clearly state that "Killing anything is wrong" it could be assumed that the killing of people is what they were intentionally speaking of. While God said "thou shall not kill", God also allows many sacrifices in his name. He has Abraham go up to his alter to sacrifice his only son. After seeing Abraham's true devotion, he instead tells him he should sacrifice a lamb. If anything, the theme of "killing animals" is promoted in the Bible, over "killing people".

Second, animals have feelings. While this topic took some debating is it truly up to your historical background, knowledge, and culture whether you actually believe that animals have feelings. Furthermore, even if they do, that they should not be killed because of that fact. My initial response was that animals do not have feelings, they have instincts. 

Gary started his hour long lecture with, "animals are like our brothers and sisters, they have feelings" Immediately this sparked a controversial fire in my intellectual thought. As me and Sara debated this, her argument looked at animals such as cats and dogs. When you leave them, they miss you. When you pet them they get excited. They seem to share many of the same feelings that we have. Even my cats show love when they lick each other's heads. While I agreed that domesticated animals are designed to show something that resembles feelings, I also pointed out that wild animals also kill their young. They have a different culture and idea of family than us humans do. While animals will raise their young, after they reach a certain age, they are seen as competition for mates. They will disown them and if they see them again, will fight them to the death. This is a major difference between us humans and animals.

Another reason for this "animals have feelings" thought could have been because of our Americanized culture in which as a child we all watched movies that put human-like characteristics in animals. Movies such as the Lion King, Tom and Jerry, Happy Feet, All Dogs Go to Heaven, 101 Dalmatians, and other movies that show real life animals talking, interacting, and acting like humans give us a sense of empathy and relatedness with animals.

Gary spends a good amount of time talking about "humane slaughter". While I do agree with him that there is no such thing as "humane slaughter" and that most of the animals that are put into the food service industry are treated horribly, there is also this question, what are you doing about it? Vegans believe that by becoming vegan they are safe because they are not condoning the killing of these animals in horrific ways. While that may be true, just because you don't see something doesn't mean it is not happening. Not eating meat is not going to stop the inhumane slaughter of innocent animals, it's just masking the problem. If vegans were really against this issue they would be determined to find a way and put a plan in motion to get these inhumane slaughterhouses found out and stopped. Furthermore, they would realize that the meat industry is not going to just cease to exist altogether and what they should be doing is seeing what technology could possibly be able to give these animals a fast, painless death and promoting the use of that technology as an alternative. 

Third, meat is unnatural for your digestive system. Knowing a good bit about evolution, this one just makes me laugh. We are literally all here because of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Our ancestors couldn't survive on just gathering alone, they needed the protein that came from meat. While it is general knowledge that we all had hunter-gatherer ancestors, what we do not think about is how these ancestors came to be. Before we had bows and arrows and spears to kill animals, what were we doing? Well, going back to the very beginnings as apes, we found that eating bugs gave us protein and therefore energy. We ate beetles and termites and other bugs whenever we could. In fact, as we were tool-makers, we used long sticks as tools to poke termite nests. Our earliest ancestors would put the long stick in the termite mound, leave it for a second, and when they pulled it out, it was filled with nutritious food. Of course, eating bugs didn't satisfy us for long. As our brains got bigger they needed more energy and therefore more protein to survive. We still didn't have the means to make weapons and tools to take down other animals.

Before we had any weapons or tools, we had become scavengers. We hid in the bushes as we watched a lion take down a zebra. The lions would eat a lot of the meat, till they got their fill, and then they would walk away. Next, the hyenas would come and finish all the meat on the bones, licking them clean. After this animal was nothing but a pile of bones, humans would come to it. There was no meat left on the bones, but what was still there was the nutritious marrow that was still inside the bones. The lions and the hyenas did not have sharp enough teeth to cut through these bones to get to the marrow. But humans, being the tool-makers that we are, had sharp edged stones that acted as blades to cut open bone, and we would eat the marrow for nutrients. It is only after we became more advanced did we move up the food chain, scaring away the hyenas, and started eating meat. As innovation advanced we were able to take down small animals with our own tools and weapons, and eventually larger animals. One theory is that the evolution of our big brains is contributed to the time period in which we began to create and control fire. Once meat was cooked, it was much easier to digest, and aided in our large brain growth.

This video shows tribal people stealing meat away from a lion:

 

 

In the YouTube video, Gary states that humans are not carnivores. We do not run after animals and tear them to pieces with our teeth. One statement of his is "If you put a two-year old in a crib with a rabbit and an apple, it is not going to eat the rabbit and play with the apple"…duh. But I do agree with Gary, we are not carnivores in the same sense as tigers or cheetahs. We are scavengers. We didn't originally acquire meat by hunting it, we acquired it by scavenging. You would be surprised at what animals, such as scorpions and squirrels, that tribal people eat. Some tribal people are known cannibals and enjoy the flesh of humans. To make a refuting argument, if you were to put a two-year old, okay let's make it a six-year old because they have teeth, in a small room with a rabbit, and that six-year old has seen his family hunt down rabbits and kill them and eat them raw, he would do the same.

In conclusion, my argument remains that meat is one of the most natural food sources for our system. It has been evolutionarily tested over and over for the millions of years we have been evolving, proving to be beneficial. It has only been recently that vegetarians and vegans have existed. They are changing a human habit that has been going on for millions of years. Furthermore, without the intelligence that we have from eating meat, vegans and vegetarians, and any kind of human, would have never existed. When we were evolving in savanna and jungle climates, things like broccoli, nuts, legumes, fruits, etc. weren't available to us to eat. While we did have gatherers that collected berries and vegetables that they found wild, there was not enough to provide enough energy for everyone in their family. Meat had to be used to supplement the lack of protein in a plant-based diet. We have made such far gains in our intelligences that we have found out scientifically and very recently in the whole of human history, that other foods and plants have the same proteins as meat. It is only because of this knowledge that beans, nuts, and other plants have protein and the accessibility of these items that vegans and vegetarians even exist. Without this knowledge or accessibility, we would still be using meat as our primary source of protein.

Fourth is "Do onto others as you would like done onto yourself". While this argument could be easily disregarded by claiming that "others" represent "other humans" and not animals, I was confronted with a different way of looking at it. I argued that "animals are not others" Sara challenged me with "why not?" I proceeded, "Animals are not intellectually similar to humans" She proceeded with a hypothetical situation. "What if one day we finally came into contact with aliens, they were intellectually way further advanced than we are…does that give them the right to consider us animals and to eat us?" I thought about that for a minute, well yes probably, but I agree that would suck.

Lastly, specism is just as bad as racism. I would like to point out that on the YouTube video, Gary talks about how wrong it is to enslave and kill other species of animals. So vegans do not believe in killing other animals. But what about the bugs that eat your precious plants, they are competition and competition must die if you are to survive. What about the bacteria and viruses that attack your body, they threaten your survival and therefore must die for you to survive. Are you not going to believe in medicine? While I agree that animals that we use as food are a lot more innocent than these, I don't understand how you can single out some creatures as deserving to live and others as not deserving to live. As well, think about your domesticated dogs and cats and horses. Are they not enslaved? They are by no means free. For a second, lets think about a world in which all animals were as free as humans to do whatever they wanted. There are beautiful wild horses running free. The only thing that they care about is getting food, in fact, they will most likely stampede through your personal gardens and eat up all the fresh vegetables that you have worked hard to plant and cultivate. They have now become your competition in acquiring food. If we should let them live then we need to provide for them a food source that is not our food source. If we do this then we are once again enslaving them by controlling their food sources and determining when and where they should be fed it. 

I am not saying that eating meat is right or wrong. I'm just saying that the fact is that in the past we had to eat meat to survive. Because of supermarkets and gardens and society that gives us access to other sources of protein, we do not have a reason to eat meat anymore. People only eat meat now because it is there, tastes good, and it provides a good amount of protein. Contrastingly, people only become vegans and vegetarians because we as humans have the knowledge that other foods have the same protein that's in meat, such as beans, legumes, and nuts. In my theory, the world is never fully going to become vegetarian or vegan so there will always be meat available. In fact, I find that it could be dangerous to your health to be vegan or vegetarian and to live in a society that is so reliant on meat as many restaurants and food places use chicken broth or meat fats in their cooking. If you are not accustomed to eating meat, you are actually in danger of getting sick from certain foods that are very prevalent in America.

The only solution that I can see to making everyone happy is to get to a point in technology where meat can be genetically grown. I am not talking about cloning cows, but about cloning cow or chicken meat, and have it grow without the brain, the face, or the living spirit of an animal to provide it. If it was never living, it could never be killed. Problem solved. What do you have to say about that vegans?  

Time to challenge myself

I feel like I have to make a change. I am stuck in the same boring routine, repetitive and tedious, every day I feel like I waste so much of my life. What are my long term goals, my short term goals? How do I begin to start a different routine? I know in the back of my mind that it takes time. It takes time to work on a different routine and become successful at it. My problem is that I always want things now. I always feel that if I just think up the most perfect idea, that I will have it done by tomorrow, and by the next day I'll be making money like crazy off it. That is not how life works unfortunately. It takes time to work on my creative, it takes time to build skills, it takes time to find a new routine or hobby, it takes time to be stable and successful in life. What I need is a challenge. I need to challenge myself.

Here are a few beneficial sites I found about challenging myself:

30 Challenges for 30 Days
10 Ways to Challenge Yourself 
How to Change Your Life in a Day

I will try to find some more inspirational works to post, as well as any changes I make to my life.

 If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place −Nora Roberts




On a similar note, a life coach can allow you to see the possibilities inside yourself. Life coaches use a psychological theory called NLP or Neuro-linguistic Programming to reprogram how someone thinks about the world. I thought this was interesting, especially about how it can be applied. Whenever I find myself thinking in a biased way, I sometimes go through a conscious re-examining of my thought process. I think, why am I biased about this? What in my past history influenced this thought? Is that really how things are in reality? How do other people think about the same subject? How can I think about this differently? While my anthropologistic training has provided insight and consciousness to this process, I never thought about it as a strategy that can be used when re-examining my own life and my biases towards my own life. The information provided on this site puts a psychological name to the process and made me realize different ways of thinking.

Our Corrupt School System

I cried today. I cried because of so many stressful things. I cried because of the realization that becoming a teacher is not all that I hoped it would be. I cried because even in college graduate classes, the curriculum is not catered toward poor college waitresses that work 14 hour days on the weekends. I cried because I need a good grade in this one class to get my teaching certificate, that's it, just this one, and I've already missed two assignments because of scheduling and assignment conflicts. I cried because I want to be one of those teachers that inspire students, that teach them life-long learning, and provide them with creative meaningful lessons...but that is just not the way our school system is set up. 

I cried because I wanted to quit, and I haven't even got started.

I found this video that explains my frustrations perfectly. It is from the viewpoint of an older, more experienced teacher, who has started, and tried, and found that a corrupt school system got in his way. He is quitting. It makes me wonder, if I'm going to be faced with the same problems, should I just quit before I start?

Everything he said in the beginning of his letter, about wanting to make a difference and produce life-long learners, is exactly what would be in the letter in my resume. Excited to start a teaching job, I would have written every word of how I want to change the world in my resume. I have volunteered at elementary schools and he describes them perfectly, "You can't play at recess because you were disruptive in class" and "It's getting too loud in this lunchroom". Field trips and guest speakers were non-existent. I've even had trouble in my graduate classes making lesson plans, because what I want to teach, what I think students will learn meaningful things from, are not in the state standards for that grade level.

It's understandable that the first designers of curriculum thought, we need to place the range of middle and high school curriculum from the easiest concepts to the hardest, or from the beginning of history to current times. In social studies alone, the curriculum progresses through a time line. World History is learned in 3rd grade, 6th grade, and 9th grade. American History is learned in 5th grade, 8th grade, and 11th grade. As well, each of these subjects of history are taught in different classes. No kid will ever learn in school that World History connects to American History in any way. Furthermore, by the time we teach and reteach kids in all the different histories, there is no time for now. No time to talk about the present, current issues and trends, where we are headed in the future, where we will be if we continue on this path. When I was taught in school, the school's grades culminated with American History...like we were the answer to all the problems that were experienced in the whole of human history. As much as history also included the history of scientific thinkers, history of innovators, history of women, history of blacks and Spanish-speaking people, history of influential people, historians, how we find out about our human history, biographies of people who changed history...I did not learn any of that. I learned about political and economic systems, not about the political and economic systems of tribal people or of China or India or Europe, but about the American political and economic system and why it "works so well".

Now, forgive me for not being optimistic but I am a college graduate, with a Bachelors in Anthropology, a minor in Studio Art, and a with a teaching certification and a Gifted Education endorsement almost completed. I have a 3.8 GPA. I have been in college for 8 years now. I am still a waitress at two restaurant jobs. My best friend Katie is 32 years old. She has a Finance degree, graduating with a 4.0 GPA. She got a restaurant waitress job when she was struggling through college, she couldn't find a finance job so she continued working there in order to pay off the loans and debt that college had accrued. She is still there 10 years later. Things haven't gotten better for us or anyone. Schools are so set on kids "making the grade" on high-stakes tests so they could look good, but what do students get out of it? 

Students get skills to get through college quickly, to ace tests, to read 40 pages of textbook each week, to write 8 page papers, to get everything handed in on time, to get high grades and GPA's....but not to learn valuable information, not to produce a great resume, not to get experience in your job field that could be put on a resume, not to learn how to do tax returns, take out mortgages, or get out of debt, not to collaborate with others, not to communicate your views.  

Everything that is needed to succeed in life is left out of school. The school system teaches students how to succeed in school...not in reality. School is not going to be reality forever. Eventually there will come a time when one must leave school and be independent and self-sufficient. School does not prepare for this time, and students are left floundering in the real world without the help of a mentor or teacher. They are forced to start at the lowest bottom, because employers will not look twice at their resume that states "No experience, but I have a 3.8 GPA and I can write papers about topics and can ace tests" The employer shuffles the application into their stack and mutters "Who cares?"

In reading class you are taught to separate fact from opinion. Students are taught to separate and discard the opinion of the author and look at just the facts. Fact might tell you something completely different than someone's opinion. But fact is ALWAYS more accurate than opinion. No one attempts to see that opinions are based off fact. Opinions are based on the author's fact, how the author sees the fact or situation from their point of view.

We only perpetuate and support systems that work for us. 

Does that sound like a fact? That may lead a student to conclude, "The fact is that our educational system is working just fine, because we keep perpetuating it and supporting it just the way it is" and a teacher who is knee-deep in the educational system says to the student "I don't think the system is working".

Who would you believe?

How do we know everyone today is homo sapiens?

I had a thought today while asked a discussion question on an online course called the History of Humankind. I thought of such an answer to this question that I was thrilled and amazed that that thought came out of my mind. Then I expanded on the answer providing a whole new, plausible way to think about evolution.

The question stated:

Stupid Question: How do we know everyone today is homo sapiens?

I thought about it for a while, my first response being sensible based off scientific data and current theories I thought, "Because we are all here, different species can't reproduce and produce fertile offspring. Only animals of the same species can." Like mules. But then I stopped myself. I thought about new DNA evidence that proves some of us are part Neanderthal. http://news.discovery.com/human/genetics-neanderthal-110718.htm. That led me to an even more important question...

What if we are interbreeding with the species that will eventually out-evolutionize us and we don't know it?

This may sound stupid also, but after thinking further into it, I proceeded. "What is a species but an animal that has evolved in a different climate/environment, one bird has only slight differences from one species to another, including beak size and wing length. Human-made measurements. Us humans have some differences too from apes. Less hair, walk upright, bigger brains. And all of these things evolved over time through our earliest ancestors. Our ancestors we call a different species. But really, you wouldn't recognize one from the other. Think about it this way. 

When no knowledge was available to the world and we all lived in close tribes on Africa, people were able to speak and they spoke of stories and ideas through traveling and interbreeding with other kinds of "peoples". These other peoples could have been hairy or not, intelligent or not, have bigger or smaller brow ridges.  Very slowly, the more intelligent were chosen over the less intelligent, smaller brow ridges got more mates than bigger brow ridges. Over time, they perpetuated these traits until their evidence today. In turn, as homo sapiens got smarter they began to influence their own environment. Taking control they left Africa in search for new environments. This is seen in our earliest ancestors from the mitochodrial Haplogroup L0 who lived about 150,000-170,000 years ago. As well, the Y-chromosome earliest paternal ancestor lived around 120,000-152,000 years ago. The San bushman have a large percentage of these genes.

Check out this Wikipedia site for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_L0_(mtDNA)

Also check out this article: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-09/24/earliest-human-genetic-split

As this haplogroup expanded northward, they became diverse and different haplogroups began to appear. Modern humans moved out of Africa about 125,000-60,000 years ago.

When they met Homo Neanderthalensis who were situated around the Middle East were almost just as intelligent, ate both plants and meat, had funerary rituals, made art (jewlery), and are even found to have the same gene for speech. Our earliest ancestors interacted with them, exchanging ideas and products. Kind of like Columbus did when he met the Indians. They didn't have anything like guns back then so they probably lived in relative harmony with probably a few retaliations. Neanderthals were a different species and looked nothing like our ancestors that were evolving out of Africa. Most research now suggests that Neanderthals were light skinned and red haired, due to the colder climate they lived in, much like the bottom two pictures.

After living in harmony for some time, they were bound to interbreed. This was likely around 80,000-50,000 years ago. Don't get me wrong, Neanderthals looked very similar to modern humans. Because of this, humans did not recognize them as a different species. But they did have some differences. Their bones were much thicker and brow ridges more prominent, traits that adapted them to the cold ice age weather. In this previous ice age, modern humans didn't feel much change as they were in Africa. As the climate changed, Homo sapiens most likely moved out of Africa because it was getting hotter and water was drying up, plants were becoming more scarce. So for their survival, smart Homo sapiens began to move upward to the Middle East. The Middle East's temperature was just right! Smart neanderthals living in northern climates moved southward towards warmer climates. As the climate got warmer, bone density decreased, people evolved to be taller and less stocky. Since these adapted traits would work better evolutionarily, it was those individuals with these traits that were found to be more attractive and mated more. True Neanderthals would have a hard time in the environment and would die earlier in life. Homo sapiens evolved to be roughly a mix of...

 AND

The predecessors of this hybrid spread all over the world, moving to Australia  Europe, Northern Asia, and Southern Asia. In Europe, their skin color lightened. In places closer to equator, India and Spain and Italy, their skin color turned an light brown or olive. Africans are the only race without Neanderthal genetics, which means that no hybrids ventured back down into hot Africa. They only ventured north and east into uncharted land. Land that glaciers were melting from and was providing all sorts of new animals and vegetation. Other species lived with the Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, and their hybrid children...and that were the Denisovans. Evidence shows their mixing with early humans as well, http://io9.com/5715516/another-humanoid-species-co+existed-with-early-humans-and-neanderthals.

Eventually people moved into new lands, unknowingly following the climate change as the animals and plants increased in frequency more northward. Even if each generation one by one moved a couple feet northward, they would have covered the earth by 30,000 years ago. 

Earliest human ancestors in India are thought to date to 50,000-60,000 years ago. http://phys.org/news/2013-06-refutes-early-humans-india-prior.html

Earliest human ancestors to arrive in China, new evidence suggest to be between 42,000-39,000 years ago. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6518527.stm.

Earliest human ancestors to arrive in North America were about 13,500 years ago. They followed larger animals such as mammoths down into mid North America as the last ice age melted a land bridge through present-day Canada. They used spears with Clovis points to work together to take down large animals. http://www.crystalinks.com/clovis.html

One type of modern human species, the Cro-magnon (50,000-10,000 years ago) displayed a mix of archaic and modern human traits. This video will show some Cro-magnon men and how similar they appeared to the everyday human you or I would see on the street:

So, getting back to my original question and answer. As you can see, different "species" (as we define them) are separated by only a few tens of thousands of years. We have only been similar to how we appear now for the last 52,000 years or so, maybe less. Of course, as natural selection and evolution play their parts, we will eventually evolve into what we are collectively choosing as mates. Whether we prefer boyfriends who are buff, smart, or with certain skills or looks, it is all playing a part in evolution as a whole. Many people today care much more about someone's intellect or attractiveness than their skin color or brow ridge size. These are traits that will sure be passed to our future species of human. 

To conclude, I would like to take a look at our original question:

How do we know everyone today is homo sapiens?

The answer to this question is that we can't know because...

What if we are interbreeding with the species that will eventually out-evolutionize us and we don't know it?

And the answer to that is...We are.

The Future of Learning

So recently I have had a lot of time to think. I am learning many new things from my education classes about standards, current views and trends, gifted education, literacy in the 21st century, etc. and I need a place to track my learning. In my education classes, I am taught to have kids take control of their own learning and to make learning meaningful. Although, the way my education classes are set up, I am doing assignments for the grade and to get finished with college, not necessarily thoroughly learning the content. This site I will use to change that. When next year comes around and I wish I would remember what I learned this year, I will have this blog to come to to analyze and critique what I have learned previously.

I will start with a quote I learned recently...

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.
      
-Alvin Toffler (1928- )

This quote relates to the Common Core State Standards that are about to be implemented in Florida. The CCSS focus on the learning process, rather than just content knowledge. It asks essential questions such as 
"How do students learn?"
"What are they learning this for?" 
"How does this knowledge relate to real world situations?"
"How can students apply this knowledge in different ways?" 
The CCSS implements a focus on higher-order thinking, critical thinking, deeper learning, transferable knowledge, collaboration, creativity & innovation, and problem-solving.

In the past, school was a place where students would go to receive information. Today, schools should be a place where students can go to learn how to find information, to adapt/understand/critique current information, to relate information to different situations and contexts, and to think creatively, providing new information to the world. 

In the world today, there are millions of learners who will be living a very different world when they grow up. In this future world, it will be essential to know about technology and how to navigate the internet. In the future, new jobs will focus on the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields. These fields will make up the parts of essential careers. We will finally be able to decode our world on a scale that has never been done before in human history. So I will leave you with my own quote...

"In this next decade, society is going to progress further than ever before...whether our students are ready for it or not."

That's what us teachers have to be prepared for.