Blog Assignment 4 (30/09/2012) ‘Outline and evaluate evolutionary explanations of food preference.’

1. The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation- it is the environment to which a species is adapted. Animals that lived in different environments or made their livings in different ways faced different reproductive problems, and that’s why all animals aren’t the same.
2. The EEA is involved with our eating behaviours in the way that we have had to adapt from hunter gatherer times. For example, cooking. The hunter gatherers didn’t cook as they didn’t know to; they didn’t know to make fires to cook food so their bodies were prepared to eat raw ingredients, even meat. They would know the good foods from the bad foods purely through trial and error, as there was no way of knowing of foods that could kill. However, modern day we cook our foods. This is because our bodies have adapted to not be able to handle raw meats, and it could kill us so we cook to survive. Now it is completely normal and expected to cook foods, and would be out of the ordinary if we didn’t.
3. Humans have a preference for sweet foods because in the hunter gatherer times, they knew foods such as berries and fruits were ripe, and more importantly, safe to eat if they were sweet. Also, because it is the sweet foods where energy is gained from- carbohydrates. However, nowadays our sweet tooth doesn’t make us crave fruits or berries, but sweets and cakes etc.
4. We eat meat because this is where we gain a lot of protein and calories, and hunter gatherers would have used this energy from calories to hunt. Also, it would have been a lot quicker to hunt an animal, than to forage for hours looking for safe fruits. Humans developed intelligence, which is how they learned to hunt; they would make tools and work as a group, which then lead to social skills, and therefore language. Hunter gatherers would eat the meat for the protein as this contributed to the growth of the brain in humans. The men who hunted the most meat were deemed the most attractive to women as they were intelligent, and would be able to provide for a family.
5. A study to support these ideas is………………………..
6. A study to challenge these ideas is………………………..
7. Deterministic the philosophical principle that every state of affairs, including every human event, act, and decision is the inevitable consequence of antecedent states of affairs. (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/deterministic) This then means that our eating behaviours are pre-disposed, and free will has nothing to do with it. Reductionist is an attempt or tendency to explain a complex set of facts, entities, phenomena, or structures by another, simpler set (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/reductionist)
8. Evolutionary theories can be thought of as deterministic in the sense that eating behaviours have been inherited from our ancestors. They learned to cook food, so now humans don’t even think about cooking foods, the just do it. Some foods they have no choice but to cook because if not they will not survive. So in this sense, eating behaviours are deterministic due to evolution.
9. Evolutionary theories can be thought of as reductionist in the sense that………
10. Non-falsifiable means that a theory can not be proved wrong. It is impossible to disprove it, so therefore it is ‘non-falsifiable’.
11. Evolution is non-falsifiable because there is no way anybody can get evidence to prove its wrong. There are theories that may argue against it, but it is impossible to collect evidence which would prove it 100% wrong.