(May 31, 2014 at 10:06 am)Simon Moon Wrote:(May 31, 2014 at 9:50 am)Chas Wrote: Just because you don't think eating raw gazelle is appetizing, you can't conclude that a lion doesn't.
Exactly.
A more drastic example is rotting meat.
We think rotting meat smells bad. But in actuality, there are various molecules produced by rotting meat that don't smell bad or good until they are perceived by an organism.
We think they smell bad because rotting meat could kill us. So we evolved a survival mechanism to avoid rotting meat by detecting it as smelling bad.
But the exact same molecules that we detect as smelling bad, are detected by vultures or flies as smelling good, and necessary for their survival.
The main reason why humans can't eat rotting meat is that we don't have the proper gut bacteria to digest it. If we had vulture guts we would be fighting over road kill. Since protein is hard to come by for most animals the question should be why don't we have the necessary bacteria to eat rotten meat?
