Richard Dawkins claims we should eat lab-grown human meat

[The Grand Nudger]

Fair point... there are some species that engage in cannibalism... Praying Mantis' and maybe some types of spiders come to mind... but for them, though I've not got the slightest clue why they do that, it seems to be part of their lifecycle... not just individually but as a group... ie their reproductive goals are met... so in the balance of the whatever counts as their 'society'/collective, especially where there are many males to one female or whatever (ie like a hive, where some are expendible in service to the queen), it just doesn't seem to be detrimental at all to their success as a species. In other words it just seems that that's a finely balanced part of their ecosystem.

They need to eat, the food is there, so they eat.  The point of showing those sorts of ritual cannibalistic acts is that it demolishes any notion that cannibalism is somehow universally a bad idea in any evolutionary sense - a thing flatly selected against.  More mundane acts of cannibalism than any spider eating it's mate come next.  It rains food on the ocean floor from all the incidental cannibalism that goes down.  We've seen people do it, and we've seen other apes do it.  Cannibalism is present at every level and organization of life..from the smallest and "simplest" organisms up to ourselves.  Maybe because we all need to eat..hehehe.

But in the human case it would not be like that... not part of our nature but rather a deviation from it, and thus something that could upset that equivalent balance. If that makes sense? You're making me think more than I was planning to in this thread... I was just dipping in the middle of watching a programme

"Our nature" is not a thing set in stone.  It's only a deviation from "our nature" in that we don't do it..but cannibalism is the "nature" of a cannibal and not eating people would be a deviation form his "nature".  What balance would it, or could it, upset? It doesn't seem to be upsetting anything anywhere else.

More thought is always a plus, eh? So, about the above..and things we think make sense. Would it be fair to notice that your idea of the "balance" we find ourselves in, conceptualized as a natural balance..is more accurately a social balance? That you think that cannibalism is a deviation because it;s a deviation from your culture? That your notions of natural balance are silently informed by your cultural assumptions.