Why must anything murder to stay alive?

[Sherlocks]

If god did it or evolution did it we are still we are today. Currently, there are three types. An Herbivore(Eats plants and fruit), carnivore(Eats meat) and an Omnivore(eats both). Now plants have actually evolved so we can eat them. Plants are designed to be eaten so you can later spread and poop them somewhere else and more plants can go. Plants are very efficient that way. Mammals, however, are not created the same way. A mammal must eat plants and fruits or else they must eat another animal. If you are like humans you need a blend of both of those things. However why exactly did we end up having to murder other creatures for their life source? Considering plants are designed to be eaten and that why they have fruit morally its okay to eat plants. If we say god created things this way why would he require we murder things, why even have death? If its evolution why did creatures evolve to murder each other when trees make perfectly available fruit? 

[russtopher]

Educated guess...somewhere along the line of evolution humans found that meat and fat (meat/fat are much more nutrient/calorie dense than plants) gave longer lasting effects from an energy/caloric standpoint. Obviously using the rest of the animal (bones, skins) for tools, clothing, or whatever was very beneficial. Why we initially started eating meat...who knows? Maybe it was an idea out of survival? We had to kill what was hunting us and saw other animals ate each other, why not give it a try?

 

We forget, humans are nothing more than animals.

[Horse Ham Radio]

From an evolutionary perspective there was probably a bottleneck sometime where there wasn't enough plant material to support the animal population, so in order for a species to improve its survivability it learned to use other animals as an additional food source.

[Grumpy Alien]

We're omnivores... we can easily survive on a herbivore diet. (And while we can digest meat and gain nutrients from it, we can't survive on a carnivore diet.)

[Correner]

According to the theory of endosymbiosis, even plant cells started off as predators.

[Skycaptain]

On a general level. If evolution hasn't created carnivores, herbivores would have thrived to such an extent that plant life would have all been eaten. Then the herbivores would have died through hunger, and everything would have had to start again. 

[Urishir]

Even plants are ruthless against others, yes there are co-operating plants between "species" but there also is chemical warfare and such. Peace among creation is an illusion

[Correner]

If herbivory thrived to such an extent, many plants would have simply developed better defenses. Examine the acacia, which maintains ant colonies by providing food and shelter to dissuade elephants from consuming it.

[NerotheReaper]

Well with evolution humans found out how useful eating both plants and meat, meat gives protein that help repair tissues, and heal the body. Which was important especially during the time of early humans, for their medical care wasn't like what we have today. If they just did fruit sure they could survived there are vegetarians today, but back in the day meat was very useful in making sure communities survived. Another thing that came from hunting and living in communities, was let's say Family A and Family B. Both of the men  went out hunting one day, and the man from A wasn't successful he could ask the man from B to share that day's kill. Then the man from B would expect some form of payback in the future. 

[Dreamer23]

a) A severe lack of protein can hamper brain development, which is an evolutionary  disadvantage. If you think about all the veggie protein sources you'll notice that they are hard to get before the rise of farming.

b) Plants are far more seasonal than animals. 

[Sherlocks]

7 hours ago, Skycaptain said:

On a general level. If evolution hasn't created carnivores, herbivores would have thrived to such an extent that plant life would have all been eaten. Then the herbivores would have died through hunger, and everything would have had to start again. 

 

 

 

That doesn't follow the natural cycle of things. In nature, if there is too little of something, a portion of that population will die. Kind of like if the Coyote population age too many rabbits some coyotes would die out, till the population of rabbits went up again. Humans have gotten around this by simply GROWING more food or GROWING more animals to kill. So plants and plant eaters should follow the same pattern. 

[chair jockey]

Because the laws of the universe are malformed and broken. I continue to endorse them tacitly only because my survival instinct is too strong for me to overcome.

[Anthracite_Impreza]

That's just how life evolved, there's no rhyme or reason.

[Peachyy]

To the question, "why?" the cosmos hardly bothers to return the reply, "why not?"

 

lol "murder"?? BROSEPH. Do you know how nutritious bone marrow is? pay attention to that you're a human saying that the survival killing by other animals is immoral. The question of whether or not something is murder is a moral issue that we ask ourselves when we look at the behavior that leads to the death of something else. Yet again, a human assumes to know these judgments and is asking the question, "why?" as if a recognizable voice will answer them to explain the plan of why early bipeds cracked a bone and sucked out it's raw contents, for anything other than the fact that when your tribe is about to starve to death, you decided to explore the carcass of a dead creature and realized that the substance you ate helped you to live. It may be natural for us to ask these questions because we might be the only species right now that choose not to organize their societies after evolutionary processes, but keep in mind that just because we may have decided that something is wrong, doesn't mean it's unnatural. And it also doesn't mean that it is wrong, simply because we thought it. 

 

You say with certainty that a plant was designed to be eaten, but how then can't you see that the meat on a creature's bone, humans included, have all amino acids, B12, B3, B6, iron, zink, selenium, creatine, carnosine, + ?  With the same justification of why a plant should be eaten, we're a healthy meal, too. 

 

IMO.

[loomborn]

i think you don't understand how evolution actually works. nothing evolves for a destiny. plants didn't evolved so animals could eat them, it was the other way around. animals happened to develop the ability to metabolize plants because it was a good energy resource that happened to exist in that moment of scarcity. it was advantageable to get nutrients from them so they survived and their modifications got to the next generations. 

 

most of the time, in fact, living beings evolve into other forms because of that. there is a lack of resources or a enviroment change that triggers or accelerates a natural selection. but its an arbitrary consequence of it, like if the tower that is this world was built brick by brick with no blueprints at all, just what it works best. 

 

that said, the only reason some animals are carnivores is because it's evolutively viable. it fits in the tower without unbalancing it and making it fall. could a world where carnivores never happened exist? probably, but it's not ours, and given that continuously happens through life history, it doesn't matter how many extinctions and shit occur, it doesn't appear to be a very good solution. 

[SithAzathoth WinterDragon]

All living things on the planet changed in it's own way through time, as they changed so did diets of living creatures if they were not already eating something they could, they had to change their diet. Indeed there was a time period all live forms were forced to changed how they ate due to Mount Toba's eruption causing a drop in many things species relied on, and so many things needed to be changed in their diets to keep their species going. I do not believe in a deity so it's just how nature is and nature will keep changing.

[gisiebob]

say you want to change the oil in your car. now first for you to do that you need the base material, cude oil, so get a lot of organic material and put it under pressure for a few million years or so, but we don't have the ability to do that, so lets say that step is aleady done for us and we just have to pump it out of the ground. now that you have your crude oil you have to refine it. we can do that sure, but you can also just go to the supermarket and get a quart of refined oil there. it takes a lot of work to turn how plants store energy into how animals store energy, and so if your body doesn't need to expend resources on energy refinement then it can get luxuries like increased intelgence.

 

 

[XYZ96]

The simple answer from an evolutionary stand point is because it was an available option and we could, so why not?.. 

If you were to lets say eliminate all animals that are not herbivores, with a very high likelihood carnivores would eventually evolve again. Organisms tend to evolve in the direction of least competition, so if you have two organisms and two types of food, one will likely evolve in a way to easily eat the one kind of food and the other will focus on the other kind, that way neither ends up with a shortage of food (well known real world example of this is Darwins finches and there many different specialized beaks to eat different things). So if we have our world of herbivores, they have many many competitors, so, some will likely evolve to eat something were there are no or few competitors, like the practice of eating meat, which would lead to the rise of carnivores once again. 

And besides if Organisms hadn't evolve to eat and though that kill each other, neither animals, plants or fungus or really any multicellular organism would have ever come into existence, we'd all still be one celled organisms...   

 

[Sherlocks]

On 3/12/2017 at 11:05 AM, Peachyy said:

To the question, "why?" the cosmos hardly bothers to return the reply, "why not?"

 

lol "murder"?? BROSEPH. Do you know how nutritious bone marrow is? pay attention to that you're a human saying that the survival killing by other animals is immoral. The question of whether or not something is murder is a moral issue that we ask ourselves when we look at the behavior that leads to the death of something else. Yet again, a human assumes to know these judgments and is asking the question, "why?" as if a recognizable voice will answer them to explain the plan of why early bipeds cracked a bone and sucked out it's raw contents, for anything other than the fact that when your tribe is about to starve to death, you decided to explore the carcass of a dead creature and realized that the substance you ate helped you to live. It may be natural for us to ask these questions because we might be the only species right now that choose not to organize their societies after evolutionary processes, but keep in mind that just because we may have decided that something is wrong, doesn't mean it's unnatural. And it also doesn't mean that it is wrong, simply because we thought it. 

 

You say with certainty that a plant was designed to be eaten, but how then can't you see that the meat on a creature's bone, humans included, have all amino acids, B12, B3, B6, iron, zink, selenium, creatine, carnosine, + ?  With the same justification of why a plant should be eaten, we're a healthy meal, too. 

 

IMO.

 

 

 

This is a strawman 

I never said anything about animals not being nutritious or it being immoral to kill animals for food 

 

Trees have fruit

Animals do not. If you remove the organs of an animal it dies 

Its a nice idea to think you can just remove parts of something like a cow or chicken without harming it but that simply isn't reality. You can remove fruit from a tree without killing the tree. You can maybe argue this for lizards since certain species of lizards can grow back limbs and drop their tails but I think it probably still causes pain to keep chopping off body parts. Also star fish grow back arms and if the missing limb isnt destroyed it can grow a new starfish from that limb. 

 

Also if you ever seen fruit/nut trees before you would realize that if you don't pick them a lot of times the fruit and nuts will just fall on their own and sometimes go bad if not eaten right away. 

 

You can't do that to things like people, cows, chickens. I mean it would be cool if pigs just dropped bacon off to eat and grew back more the next day but that is simply not how life works. You simply have to kill the animal somehow and then eat its corpse. 

[Sherlocks]

On 3/12/2017 at 11:10 AM, loomborn said:

i think you don't understand how evolution actually works. nothing evolves for a destiny. plants didn't evolved so animals could eat them, it was the other way around. animals happened to develop the ability to metabolize plants because it was a good energy resource that happened to exist in that moment of scarcity. it was advantageable to get nutrients from them so they survived and their modifications got to the next generations. 

 

most of the time, in fact, living beings evolve into other forms because of that. there is a lack of resources or a enviroment change that triggers or accelerates a natural selection. but its an arbitrary consequence of it, like if the tower that is this world was built brick by brick with no blueprints at all, just what it works best. 

 

that said, the only reason some animals are carnivores is because it's evolutively viable. it fits in the tower without unbalancing it and making it fall. could a world where carnivores never happened exist? probably, but it's not ours, and given that continuously happens through life history, it doesn't matter how many extinctions and shit occur, it doesn't appear to be a very good solution. 

 

 

You have it backwards. No one ever said anything about destiny aside from you. Things evolved and adapted to the environment, not the other way around. Unless you are arguing creationism and god simply made everything for humans to use. Than I guess that premise would be considered true. Plants evolving to actually be eaten makes them one of the most efficient creatures there are, as well as that they can live hundreds of years without dying. The rule of nature is kill or be killed. Plants however adapted to grow fruit which has seeds and so will be eaten so the trees don't need to die. 

[daveb]

When you get right down to it the only thing any form of life evolves to do is reproduce. The source of energy to do that is incidental. If there is an available source of energy some organisms will evolve to use it, especially if there is little or no competition for that source of energy yet.

 

Also, murder is a loaded and misleading term in this case. It implies some level of morality and/or ethics, which I don't believe is applicable to nature in this way.

[Sherlocks]

1 hour ago, daveb said:

When you get right down to it the only thing any form of life evolves to do is reproduce. The source of energy to do that is incidental. If there is an available source of energy some organisms will evolve to use it, especially if there is little or no competition for that source of energy yet.

 

Also, murder is a loaded and misleading term in this case. It implies some level of morality and/or ethics, which I don't believe is applicable to nature in this way.

 

I suppose slaughter would have been more fitting? 

[ThaHoward]

Not everything need a reason or label, somethings just are as it is. Also then it is the whole circle of life that was first theorised in the Lions King

[Sherlocks]

18 minutes ago, ThaHoward said:

Not everything need a reason or label, somethings just are as it is. Also then it is the whole circle of life that was first theorised in the Lions King

 

That isnt very deep 

[ThaHoward]

Never meant it to be that. 

[LadyLor]

The competition mentioned in some of the responses above is a good reason why things evolved to 'murder' each other. Another thing is that if one species was perfect then there would be less genetic diversity and would make evolution useless.

My counter questions are; Why would god create more than one species in this case? 

                                          Why would that original species diverge, if there was only one to begin with?

[daveb]

2 hours ago, Sherlocks said:

I suppose slaughter would have been more fitting? 

That's still a loaded term.

Kill is a better term in my view - it's more neutral in terms of assigning morality or ethics to the act.

 

Not to mention all of the organisms that consume animal flesh/meat that they haven't killed and that may have died of "natural causes" (old age, disease, etc.).

 

Also, there are plants that kill animals (in some cases, for protection, but in some cases, for consumption).

 

The bottom line is that if nothing ever killed anything else things would soon reach the point of overpopulation. It's unsustainable to not have death and killing and then it would be a colossal waste for nothing to consume the remains. If you look at any case where natural predators are removed from the picture (because they were killed by hunters/predators, died of other causes (disease, lack of food, natural disaster, etc.), or because organisms were introduced into an area lacking in organisms that could prey on them), the organisms breed until they overwhelm their ecosystem.

 

The only way you could have an ecosystem where nothing killed or ate other organisms would be if the organisms were in stasis, never reproducing, never dying, and if said organisms were able to fuel their activity/life without needing to consume anything that might have died otherwise. For example, if you had an ecosystem where the organisms all lived solely on solar power and were immortal. But then things could never change and evolve into more complex forms. So I'm not sure how such an ecosystem could or would ever come into being.

 

 

p.s. @Sherlocks, I hope it doesn't feel like I'm picking on you. I think it can be good (and fun) to think about things and examine the possibilities. Evolution is a fascinating field of study!

[Muledeer]

Murder = man killing man and has a deep moral connotation.  Even killing other humans within the scope of warfare is not considered murder.  I worked as a slaughter butcher and I never murdered an animal.

Slaughter = man killing animal.

Killing = causing the death of another living thing.

 

I cannot see how any biological system could continue without predation, fierce competition and scavengers.

[Sisky]

I don't think nature and evolution took the human definition of murder into account.

[Sherlocks]

On 3/19/2017 at 5:04 PM, daveb said:

That's still a loaded term.

Kill is a better term in my view - it's more neutral in terms of assigning morality or ethics to the act.

 

Not to mention all of the organisms that consume animal flesh/meat that they haven't killed and that may have died of "natural causes" (old age, disease, etc.).

 

Also, there are plants that kill animals (in some cases, for protection, but in some cases, for consumption).

 

The bottom line is that if nothing ever killed anything else things would soon reach the point of overpopulation. It's unsustainable to not have death and killing and then it would be a colossal waste for nothing to consume the remains. If you look at any case where natural predators are removed from the picture (because they were killed by hunters/predators, died of other causes (disease, lack of food, natural disaster, etc.), or because organisms were introduced into an area lacking in organisms that could prey on them), the organisms breed until they overwhelm their ecosystem.

 

The only way you could have an ecosystem where nothing killed or ate other organisms would be if the organisms were in stasis, never reproducing, never dying, and if said organisms were able to fuel their activity/life without needing to consume anything that might have died otherwise. For example, if you had an ecosystem where the organisms all lived solely on solar power and were immortal. But then things could never change and evolve into more complex forms. So I'm not sure how such an ecosystem could or would ever come into being.

 

 

p.s. @Sherlocks, I hope it doesn't feel like I'm picking on you. I think it can be good (and fun) to think about things and examine the possibilities. Evolution is a fascinating field of study!

 

 

 

 

Wouldn't this fall back to the old rabbit vs wolf concept, though? If there are a lot of rabbits the population of wolves will go up but if they start eating too many rabbits the wolf population would drop. In fact, this concept has happened with species in today society. Either they don't have enough ecosystem and populations drop, or they run out of things too eat and populations drop.