Are we all fucked?

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

There we go, found in the agenda. She gave a talk at the institute here last year:
https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_special_about_the_human_brain

[Eoin McLove]

Makes sense but it doesn't eliminate the fact that humans eat, and historically have eaten, a predominantly meat based diet,  supplemented by vegetables. Her theory might go hand in hand with Pinker's?

[Pedrito]

Because my missus is vegetarian, I decided to go that way for a while, throwing in some meat here and there. I've listened to a lot of stuff on it all and having gone back to consuming a lot of meat and protein now, I definitely won't be becoming a vegetarian or vegan anytime soon.

I train a lot, 6 days a week. Martial arts, weights, hill running. I found the veggy type diet was amazimg in almost a detox way but after those initial effects level off after a couple of months, I found I would lack energy and strength. Yesterday I ate a whole venison chorizo after the gym...talk about a massive boost. I still eat loads of veg and fruit, but also tonnes of eggs and good meat 2 or 3 times a week, aswell as a lot of fish. I know people who are vegetarian all their lives, and though they mightn't think so, I find them to be really low energy type people. Again, whatever floats your boat, I honestly don't care, but I'm not sure we'll be getting rid of meat too soon as an environmental solution.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Makes sense but it doesn't eliminate the fact that humans eat, and historically have eaten, a predominantly meat based diet,  supplemented by vegetables. Her theory might go hand in hand with Pinker's?

It depends on which stage of human development we're talking about. Meat came before cooking, obviously. Becoming omnivores definitely gave our ancestors an advantage to survive one stage of evolution, and their descendents discovered fire and cooking more or less around the time that our neocortex exploded out of all proportion with any other mammalian species. I'm not going to say you're wrong with "predominantly", but the really essential aspect that set our ancestors and us apart was the omnivorous one, which is a part of what allowed us to travel around so much and survive in so many different climates. The debate over whether the balance tipped more towards meat or non-meat is very much still raging (among proper scientists, obviously excluding whatever shite PETA, but equally militant anti-PETA types, etc., come out with).

[Eoin McLove]

Our ancestors were cooking meat as well as veg. We have always been omnivorous and I think that finding a balance is the way to go in terms of personal health.  The question is which is more sustainable for the environment. I know there is talk of the west moving toward consuming insects like they do in Asia but that's an extreme change for cultural reasons and certainly not something l could see becoming popular in the space of a generation. If we really are in a global crisis it's not a viable solution.

Say the world did go vegetarian. What would happen to all the cows? Would they be massively culled or simply released into the wild? You still have to factor in the carbon factor of a billion cows roaming around the wild! Do we kill them off and eat them to get rid of them? Not an entirely serious question but it does raise a question about rewilding domesticated animals. If we need to use the farmland to grow crops where do all the cows,  sheep and pigs go? Fire them up the Wicklow Mountains,  sure. Be grand!

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

You can't "rewild" a breed which was never wild. If you released huge numbers of domesticated animals into the wild, it would cause havoc, especially in areas where there were natural predators, whose numbers would explode with the temporary feast available. I guess we'd eat them until they were all gone!

[Pedrito]

You'd have to cull them. Either way it's never going to happen. I think the fuel companies and big industry is what we need to target.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

You'd have to cull them. Either way it's never going to happen.

When we imagine it to be next-to-impossible for our diets to drastically shift, I think we invariably forget about the enormous subsidization of meat and dairy production:

https://medium.com/@laletur/should-governments-subsidy-the-meat-and-dairy-industries-6ce59e68d26

Without those subsidies, say if that cost was shifted to the consumer, the food landscape would change very rapidly. Not saying it will happen, but those state subsidies are the obvious target for those lobbying for less meat production and consumption, since they reveal that neither are cost effective (another case of "using" capitalism to help solve the climate crisis).

[hellfire]

Always thought that the answer lies with consumers really.  If nobody was buying bottles of Coke because they were plastic you'd better believe there would be an alternative within a few months.

[Eoin McLove]

People aren't just going to stop driving cars or flying from one country to another,  though.  I think in terms of plastics and so on,  yeah,  that's very much attainable on a societal level- supply and demand... As Pedro said above,  though,  the main issue is fossil fuels and that's a change that needs to happen at a level far above our heads.  That said,  I think the change is coming.  It feels like the mood has shifted toward taking these matters more seriously and the fact that Greta Thunberg has been given such a platform indicates that, whether you agree with her being made into a spokesperson or not (I'm not sure that I do), the landscape has shifted.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

"every generation throws a hero up the pop charts" - Paul Simon.

Better Greta Thunberg than Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus, and probably similar levels of exploitation going on, though no one ever seemed too concerned before!

[Pedrito]

"I don't think we have time to overthrow capitalism first and solve climate change later."

Dead right we don't. As Zizek famously and very correctly said, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

The economic system we've imposed on the world, nominally called capitalism, is absolutely fucking retarded in light of finite resources. Alternatives to it are not at all limited to "communism".

That Zizek quote reminds me of Nietzsche's

"man would rather will nothingness than not will."

Maybe nothingness in this instance could be vacuous consumerism..a complete reversal of the ascetic ideal, and yet in another way just as empty. Zen consumerism as such

[Eoin McLove]

https://youtu.be/3WbGVAo1hyQ

Very interesting discussion here with Dr. Peter Ridd about his research on the Great Barrier Reef,  its current state of health, his opinion being that it's not actually fucked. He goes into the details of what coral bleaching actually means, likening it to other common and natural regenerative occurrences like forest fires and sun burnt grass.  He says that it is a normal occurrence during summers of intense heat and that the coral actually either revives itself (ie that it's not actually dead despite looking so) or that the dead parts will be replaced,  all within the space of a year.  He also discusses his case against his former employers, James Cook University, which is somewhat worrying if his claims about peer review in the field of science are true. I'd never heard mention of the reproducibility crisis. I'm interested in hearing some of you science boffins on what you think of this storys as no doubt you'll be more clued in than I am.

Edit.  He also claims that a rise in one or two degrees in sea temperature would be beneficial for the reef as coral grows more abundantly in warmer waters. Controversial!

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Never heard of him before, but the researchers who rebutted his original article (both printed in same Marine Biology journal) were kind/smart enough to pay for it to be open access, so you can read the rebuttal here, for free - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X18301425?via%3Dihub - but if you want the original you'll have to get it through Sci-Hub, for example.

My PhD subject is researcher bias, so the reproducibility crisis is a large part of how that manifests. Science as an institution is an absolute mess, far more of a mess than I was expecting when I moved into it from philosophy of science, already thinking it was a mess but wanting to get some first hand experience. I've been working in labs now for over four years and, yeah, most researchers' driving force is their career and the prestige of recognition (i.e. over and above a desire for knowledge for its own sake), which is something that also drives bias and, indirectly, the reproducibility crisis too.

It's a double-edged sword though. You can't call on the possibility that some studies in ecology showing X may not be reproducible as evidence that Y is therefore the case. Because any data pointing towards Y must also be made subject to the same rigour you're demanding. From a cursory glance at the two papers (I'll listen to the interview now), it would seem that Ridd is calling bias on others while very much sweeping his own under the carpet. Pinker is another expert at this!

[Eoin McLove]

Ah,  so we still are all fucked.  Phew.