Problems with the theory of evolution.

[Rahul]

This is another point I'd like to make. In my senior year of science class my teacher (who I also suspect is an atheist) was explaining to us that humans developed large complex brains because "we integrated meat into our diets a long time ago".

Hi Jamie. Welcome to the forums!

Some people in this thread believe you are a Poe. I'm not really sure, nor do I care. But this question of yours is something that I've always taken a personal interest in. So I'm going to go into some detail about it.

Now simply saying we developed large, complex brains because we started eating meat is incorrect. Incorporating meat into our diet allowed us to develop large brains but did not cause us to develop large brains.

The more accurate answer is far more interesting.

Now as you have already pointed out there are other predatory animals out there. And, in fact, predatory animals such as large cats and dogs and whatnot are more intelligent than herbivores. They have to be. Eating plants doesn't involve a lot of intelligence. Hunting animals, however, does involve a bit of intelligence. So let's compare some of the other large carnivores in Africa where our species evolved.

Lions. Have you ever seen a lion in real life? You can't really grasp how huge these animals are from watching them on TV. They're massive. So let's compare the biological adaptations between humans and lions.

Lions are much, much larger with large powerful claws, large, sharp teeth and enormously powerful jaws, able to run at very fast speeds for brief bursts.

Humans? Much smaller, nothing but residual claws not good for much, small teeth with much less powerful jaws, able to jog for hours and hours but can't run very fast at all.

So how did humans make biological adaptation to become meat eaters?

Back roughly 7 million years ago Chimps and Humans share a common ape-like ancestor.

As the terrain in Africa began to change shrinking the jungles and opening up grass land some of those tribes of that ape-like creature moved out into the new environment of the grass lands and would eventually become us. Some of the other tribes of that ape-like creature would stick to the old environment and evolve into Chimps.

So let's discuss our story.

So now at first it looks like we're pretty much screwed. Large, powerful predators around like lions and cheetahs and whatnot that would frequently catch one of us and eat us like any other prey animal. We banded together, probably hooted and hollared a lot, threw feces and rocks to try and keep the predators away. We probably would find high rocky outcropping to sleep on top of or even still climb up in trees to avoid them.

But this entire time we're also trying to find food. So we are exploiting everything we can. Anything we can find that is edible we are going for it. Berries, fruits, tubers, and then... lo and behold, we'd find the occasional remains of a lion's meal, or some other predator. So we check it out. There's really not much left. Just a lot of bones, the larger ones that is. The skull, femurs and the like. What can we do with that? Well the lions would just leave it. Later on, as darkness descended, the Hyenas with their powerful jaws would show up and with their incredible powerful, bone crushing jaws, would break up those bones and eat out the brains and marrow.

So we would try to get to it before the Hyenas. We didn't have powerful jaws so we would first try to de-articulate the skeleton which was still stuck together with tendons, drag the parts back to a safe spot, and use rocks to break apart the bones.

After a while some of the more intelligent members of our troop would notice that if they used a rock with a sharp edge on it when were were trying to break through a joint to drag off a section of bone that it would cut through the tendon pretty easily. So everyone starts looking for rocks with sharp edges. But they're fairly scarce. Then one genius here or there starts to remember that when they were beating apart a femur or skull to get at the good stuff inside that their hammer stone broke. And it had sharp edges from that break.

Before long we start slamming rocks against other rocks to break them and get sharp edges. Realizing that we can now use these rocks to disarticulate a skeleton in record time and drag it back to our safe spots we really start paying attention to the predators and where they are eating gazelles and zebras or whatnot. We wait out until they've made their kills, eaten all the good stuff, and then move in quickly to grab the left over goods.

We also notice that some large cats will kill a gazelle, eat part of it, and drag the rest in a tree. So we'd go after that guy. If he was still up in that tree we'd scream at it and throw rocks and freak him out until we chased it off. Now we occasionally could get a body with a lot more meat on it.

We probably had sharp sticks we used as well. Even certain tribes of Chimps today use sharp sticks occasionally to stab at small animals in their burrows for the occasional treat. So with our rude, all wooden spears and sharp rocks we have a regular tool kit growing. Only we are using them in more and more ways. Probably using them to help us dig up tubers from the ground for food as well.

The more intelligent we became the more refined we could make these tools, and the more ways we could come up with how to use them. Also, the most intelligent guys in our tribes could make better tools and get more food. They would trade excess food to females for mating rights. Chimps do this as well. So the more intelligent members had more offspring.

With more meat we could afford to grow larger brains and make better tools. We became more dexterious to make better tools. Dexterity takes more intelligence too.

Eventually though, about 2 million years ago, our ancestors started controlling fire. This helped keep away predators at night, helped us to break down more food like vegetable matter and meat so we could digest it easier and derive more nutrients from it.

And so it went, until we became these highly intelligent primates with highly specialized artificial weapons instead of biological weapons like claws, fangs, and super powerful jaws.

Our biological weapons were our brains and manipulative hands and arms.