Monday, November 19, 2018
Two obvious flaws
Via Sciencedaily:
Why do we like the bitter taste of coffee? Bitterness evolved as a natural warning system to protect the body from harmful substances. By evolutionary logic, we should want to spit it out. But, it turns out, the more sensitive people are to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more coffee they drink, reports a new study...Two blazingly obvious flaws. 1. "Evolutionary logic" is not logic. Natural selection is a tautology. Traits that survive survive. Loving coffee is a trait that has survived, so ipso facto it has been selected by natural selection. These concepts are not meaningful logic, just equations built from synonyms like '3 = three' or '27 = XXVII'. 2. If you're truly thinking like a scientist, the OBSERVED love of bitter foods (coffee and most leafy vegetables) should force you to discard the hypothesis that the bitter sensors on the tongue are meant to protect us from poison. They're meant to sense bitter tastes, and that's ALL you can say about them. The brain takes all sensory inputs into account, along with innate and experiential templates, when deciding whether this food is good or bad. In fact coffee is good for survival, as "science" has finally started to admit. If you're better able to detect a GOOD food, you're more likely to consume a GOOD food, so you will survive longer. So enhanced sensitivity to the taste of coffee SHOULD lead to drinking more, and SHOULD gradually be selected into the genome. Coffee drinking has only been widespread for a few hundred years, which is long enough to modulate some epigenes but nowhere near enough to lose any permanent genes.
Labels: Grand Blueprint
¶ 12:49 AM
