A Fallen world

It seems necessary to dedicate a whole section of this site to changing the conception we have about ecology, as in wild animals and wild life. So this page will mostly serve to flesh out the scientific justification behind the raw paleodiet and the theory of the evolutionary purpose of the secondary purpose of love (metasexuality), by answer the honest question:
If we are right, shouldn’t wild animals (which by definition practice our diet) show all simply no infection parasite or disease of any sort ?

The short answer is: normally, but truly undisturbed environments have become scarce and this is easy to demonstrate. This fact explains most of the contradicting studies published so far. But facts aren’t everything, interpretations make for 60% of science, if not 90% as in social science or psychology, or 100% as in evoluitonary psychology.

Today animals drop in droves in epidemics and studies prove that the parasitic load went through the roof in fish during this century. We can - and will - demonstrate that this nature, this world, is a fallen one, and does not represent what we were meant to live in before cooking or civilization.

If deers or bears die in mass (they don’t) from whatever infection how could we decently claim men shouldn’t thanks to muh raw food ? We couldn’t.
Similarily, we will deal with what people would consider as proofs that animals are cruel and vicious, in particular our cousins.

Our thesis is two-fold.

• Firstly: nature, yet a century, still existed untouched in a few places, and the boundary between the sullied and unsullied was a lot easier to tell. It was exponentially easier yet 60 years ago, to observe in a natural state, in terms of behaviors diet and health.
  Today thanks to industrialization the encroaching of men on nature has become nearly total. Pristine nature has become nearly extinct, human depredation (through logging, pollution and poaching) has become extensive to the point that we find significant concentration of plastic bag in the Arctic circle, thousands of miles from any inhabited land, as at the very bottom of the world. Today there is no place however remote, which could by default place observations out of reach of the taint of human interference. Until proved otherwise and explained by a theory based on evolutiary reasoning and our experience of natural food as observed on men (and a few animals as well), no fact is totally beyond our suspicion. Facts lie.
• Secondly, while from the 60ies to 80ies, a deep ecological (close to Rousseau-ist) conscience among scientists could be considered the most vocal or fashionable current of opinion (arguably the one with the biggest impact on public opinions), it seems that it all started to change half-way through the 90s and the consequences can only turn out disastrous in the long run.

A slew of so-called experts (the likes of Richard Wrangham) endeavoured to undermine those much warranted efforts.

Their collective strategy (no conspiracy theory, this required only a common fundamental hate for nature and dishonesty) consists in two principles:

• falsely representing as natural newly data found in thoroughly damaged environments.
• providing a hugely biased interpretation and abunding in extremely argumentative theories whose only purpose is to warp public perception of nature into a disease-ridden hellscape of violence and rape.

I swear I do not exaggerate in the slightest. Those people are motivated by a deap-seated disgust for nature and human-centric, egotistic supremacist feeling, with modern civilization at the top and nature far far below on the moral. This is very much the continuation of XIXth century’s moral tale of immorale nature vs civilized culture.

For a few decades science has had a remarkably progressist role on the ecological front ([with some mishaps, granted][global warming]) as a public institution, furthering the idea that men’ issues were the product of history, civilization, not of its nature, and that primitive cultures were mostly devoid of our unrest, violence and many of our diseases.

We can see a gradual inversal of those consideration from the 90ies, now depicting apes not as wise ancestors living in a constant paradise (which they are, or should be) but as poor creatures bent constantly striving to survive in a dangerous place among predators pathogens and most of all… their own peers. Human violence and sadism is now increasingly explained as a genetic legacy from violent ancestors.
The problem is wild nature is becoming a distant dream as a we speak:

According to the World Wildlife Fund, more than a quarter of the Amazon rainforest will be devoid of trees by 2030 if cutting continues at the same speed. If nothing is done to stop it, an estimated 40 per cent of this unique forest will be razed by 2050.

Ecological efforts cost a lot and people overall, are unredeemable, egoistical f$cks, that need constant and hard reminding of their duties to fulfill them. Western consciences have proven easy to lull and we appear more than willing to give in to a sense of fatalism to smoothen our guilt while we buy from dictatorial governments selling their primeval forests for muh bucks and turning a blind eye to (or outright paying) organized mafias killing off rare orendangered species in the most barbaric fashion… as is the case with rhinoceroses, elephants, gorillas chimpanzees and orangutans. But nearly all of those countries I mentioned are peopled with inferior Üntermensch hence too racially simply-minded to even have a conscience, if they can even be called sentient. Not all of them though, Norway China and Japan also butcher endangered whales to death witih explosive harpoons for money.

To oppose those economic interests would require the most relentless propaganda effort to educate Western population, to:

1. Invest billions in preservation efforts
2. Not ally with corrupt governments
3. Overthrow them and colonize Africa again, as well as China for the matter.

That the West, even just Europe, has the economical means to do a lot can’t be argued, but we do not want to, without a shadow of a doubt none of the above will come to pass without the political will (and popular backing) of a powerful national-naturalist regime. Sadly though… Wild nature will probably die before.

My point is:

If we cannot demonstrate that Nature is the originator of all vital balances we claim develop to their utmost point in the raw paleolithic Man, biologically and morally, then the whole intellectual edifice of instinctive paleonutrition and metapsychanalysis would totter on its base.

We saw before how low levels of pollution can induce extremely disturbing behaviors, at odds with anything we would expect from evolution. But it is probable that pollution per se, is not exactly required, and indeed might be challending to detect or argue in favor, as the cause of diseases and other incongruency with the theory of instincto.
It might apply to environments even tens of miles down a river where cities dump waste in one form or another, and obviously any animal close to human habitations will be susceptible to eating unnatural food items, digging out our shit, etc. This undoubtedly accounts for the crippling level of parasitism in commensals like foxes, boars, rabbits (dying of toxoplasmose), etc.

We characterized before how cooking influence our behavior on many levels. Conversely, we saw how natural behaviors should look from the premises of metasexuality and socio-psychological necessities.
But what if we were to extend this line of reasoning to the whole of the animal realm ? What behaviors should or should not be expected for healthy animals ?
Using on animals these critieria of health (mental and physical) we developped for humans, reveals an horrible conclusion: Not only humans, but a big part of the animal world, is suffering from the effect of cooking, low-level pollution and an unbalanced diet due to environmental destruction and reshaping by humans, sometimes for thousands of years, as long as agriculture has been a thing. This impacts as much their behavior as their health.

Going further: we’ve been eating cooked food for tens of thousands of years, constantly pouring into the environment, sea and rivers, molecules never present in such quantities in the wild except for the rare volcanic eruptions. Obviously industrialism cranked all of this up to eleven. Could it be that we never saw nature exactly as it’s meant to be (especially near human habitations) for a very, very long time since even the inception of agriculture?

Diseases in the Wild {Wild_diseases}

As stated in the introduction and our new theory of the viral phenomenon, hundreds to thousands of sick people have been observed cured of their ailment in a short time, from typically a few weeks for viral diseases, to a few months in a case of DMD (Duchenne muscular dystrophy), where a pre-teen child until then locked to its wheelchair, had regenerated his muscular fibers so much that he could run around a table playing ping-pong for the first time in his life.

Elephants

A major epidemic of Mycoplasma pneumonia caused the death of approximately 23% of the elephant (Loxodonta africana) population of Lake Manyara National Park in 1977 after a severe drought in 1976 which may have weakened these elephants; the normal mortality between 1966 and 1981 was 3% (Weyerhaeuser 1982).

But although on a lesser number of patients, we also observed similar happenings with animals, mainly farm animals and pets, either recovered or adopting the new diet as the same time as their master.
Like for humans, invariably an adequate wide food range ensured the swift eradication of parasitoses that no other methods (sometimes even resisting chemical treatments) could get rid of. Typically in the form of crawling neatly packed balls of living (or dead) worms, in feces, showing up in feces, most often no more than a mere few days after stopping cooking completely.

Let us start this study with one species in particular, Gorilla gorilla beringei, or mountain gorillas.

Effects on Diet of Displacements in the Wrong Habitat

This case study superposes with the issue of teeth decay but this deserves its own analysis. I wish to focus here on diseases instead, so as to demonstrate how the ignorance of aliesthesy and the genetic adaptation to food in a particular environment.
Those lucky gorillas have remarquably low levels of either tooth decays or diseases, despite a rate of inbreeding superior to anything we know in human population, to the point of all mountain gorillas being as closely related as half-siblings (35% homozygosity). Yet it has been proved that it didn’t seem to impact their health.
I claim that for instincto standards they still are very sick, because of a great many symptoms that demand explanations¹. Overall, from the perspective of a modern conscience those mountain gorillas fare surprisingly well. Yet this amount of tooth loss and over-inflammation (umbrella term for a whole bunch of symptoms) to the point of leaving absces and attacking bones cannot make sense without a sustained metabolic stress caused by a chronic state of dietary imbalance.

Viruga moutain gorillas (those eating less than 2% fruits) have neared extinction several times these last three centuries (Cross River mountains are nearly extinct for this reason [^cross]). And along with their numbers, their living space dwindled too and fragmented. Simply put, to get the same amount of calories, Viruga gorillas eat several times more than Western Lowland gorillas which get as much fruits as they want, or close to.

An analysis of chromosomal sequence sharing within individuals (genomic tracts of homozygosity) provided insight into recent ancestry and a measure of parental relatedness. Within mountain and eastern lowland gorilla individuals, chromosomes are typically homozygous over one-third of their length (on average 34.5% and 38.4%, respectively) (Fig. 2B), much higher than in western lowland individuals (13.8%) and exceeding even the most inbred human populations (18). We observed longer tracts in the eastern species, particularly in mountain gorillas, and a clear distinction in tract length distribution between eastern lowland and mountain gorillas (fig. S15) (15). Very long tracts (2.5 to 10 Mb) are particularly indicative of recent inbreeding, and homozygosity on this scale in mountain gorillas exceeds not only that in other gorilla populations but also that observed in the Altai Neandertal (19), consistent with parental relatedness equivalent to that between two half-siblings (19). These data suggest that mountain gorillas may have experienced several recent generations of close inbreeding.

As judged from the date when inferred Ne began to differ, the divergence of eastern and western gorillas began at least 150,000 years ago, but a more direct analysis using male X-chromosomal sequences suggests that they exchanged genetic material until around 20,000 years ago (Fig. 3B) (15). Given that this also coincides with a notable decline in western lowland gorilla Ne (Fig. 3A), it may be that environmental changes during the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000 to 19,000 years ago), when dry savannah replaced tropical forest over much of the Congo basin (21), triggered a collapse in the western population and complete separation of the two species.

Researching for calories intake would be tedious (and too variable) so I’ll keep with food weight instead: in our experience men normally eat (at most) between 1.7 and 2kg per day. Let us take a weight of 55kg (mine). It makes between 1.8-3% of my body weight.

Years of civil unrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have taken their toll on both the eastern lowland gorilla and the mountain gorilla. The eastern lowland gorilla makes its home in lowland tropical rainforests in the eastern DRC. In the last 50 years, its range has decreased from 8,100 square miles—about the size of the state of Massachusetts— to about 4,600 square miles today. This subspecies may now occupy only 13% of its historical range. There were nearly 17,000 eastern lowland gorillas in the mid-1990s but scientists estimate that the population has declined by more than 50% since then. An accurate accounting of the animals has been impossible for many years because of violence in the region.

Mountain gorillas (males) on a 15%-fruits diet eat on average 18.8kg[^study-bwindi](I wonder how they managed to assess that though !) and weight on average 163 kg(those figures come from the wild since they do not survive in zoos.). Which means a rather robust estimate of 11% of body weight ( up to 17% considering an upper limit of 190kg), proportionally three times our quantity. Which makes sense considering they have no more than five fruits in their whole environment, and never at the same time, while it’s about the amount we have in the fridge in any given week.

I can not find the ration of Western gorilla in nature, but they weight substancially less (146 kg in the wild and 157 kg in captivity. Males in captivity however, are noted to be capable of reaching weights up to 275 kg[^wiki] and 310 kg[^african_gorilla]. We find statements claiming mountain gorillas in the wild eat more than their frugivorous counterparts yet it doesn’t appear to hold true for captive western gorillas, which are reported to eat the same amount per day: 18 kg ! 12% of their weight per day is absolutely unjustifiable given a mostly frugivorous diet.
Hence I think Western gorillas eat two or three time more than they should.

And to make it clear: The naturality of diets can never be assumed beforehand, only verified. Reserves and natural parks are lightly to heavily managed and the impact this fact has on animals’ health depends on whether or not they feed them, information typically not mentioned.

I believe true nature has become rare even in Africa, let alone Europe and Asia (more heavily cultivated and populated regions, for a longer time as well), explaining both the prevalence of parasitism and unadaptative behaviors as both indicate a poor constitutive health caused by impoverished habitats.

It ensues that no study in ethology (science of animal behavior) or even biology when it comes to parasites and viruses can be trusted anymore, for almost no one take into consideration the impact of a poor food range (nor often has any idea what the animal’s original environment should be !), the stress level and physiological that it caused.

It seems that zoos still give them a lot of vegetables so counting calories is not possible, but their wide variation in body weight along with the horrible preparations primates are given in zoos, should eliminate all questioning about the cause of any disease every reported in zoo animals:

A more recent website proves that mentalities haven’t changed² one bit since 1997. In general, primates can be fed a diet based on commercial monkey biscuits, high-fiber, old world and new world primate pellets, or canned primate diet.

The appalling poverty of their diet and the fact they eat cooked food automatically discard any study whatsoever done on animals fed by humans. It applies to any primate species. Depending on the place and number of animals concerned, reserve animals may or may not be fed. However they will suffer regardless from a lack of variety, as reserves struggle politically to maintain both resource and superficy. Forest fragmentation is dire issue for animals, as it inhibits the natural circulation of seeds and fruits species, sometimes forcing apes to scout in cultivated areas for more food, leading to abberations su.

Studies show that that all populations of gorillas are very flexible, with little to no distinct preference. Their diet reflect the environment they live in and regardless of subspecies the more fruits available the more fruits they will not only eat but seek preferently. Due to both human encroachment into their original habitat and most likely the effect of climate change since the end of the last Ice Age (at the Younger Drias circa 10ky BCE), those gorillas were forced to migrate into widely unsuitable climatic zones with very little fruits.

Experts argued that the over-eating we observe for mountain gorillas is explained by the low nutritional quality of the plants they have access too. But the fact they are so specific about their food point to a slightly different cause: it is the simple fact gorillas are not herbivores, the same way pandas actually love fruits and meat, and rely on bamboos not out of choice or preference or adaptation (their hands adaptated but not their digestive system, still similar as that of their cousins, the bears).

Despite the demonstrated great pickiness of apes in matter of food the idea that their well-being might be negatively impacted by their current possibilities of alimentation has not pierced the unbelievably thick skull of the people in charge of zoos and reserves. Chimpanzees and lowland gorillas on the other hand having as many fruits they want are as versatile, can make-do with just a few fruits species sometimes depending on the season, without sign of lacking. They do not have to constantly collect dozens upon dozens of different unnutritious fibrous plants - and being very specific about which parts.

I compiled excerpts from available literature proving my point³. Wild apes who do not eat as much fruits as chimpanzees can not because of the environment, but would love to. They just got the wrong end of the stick. It entails, that to conclude that diseases is natural because apes have some of them (not nearly as much as us) is eminently dishonest. We evolved along millions of years along a certain range of environmental variation and this cannot be offset in a mere decades, or centuries, or even tens of thousands of years.

Outside that range we may survive but in suboptimal conditions. Studies seem to agree that mountain gorillas came to these altitude became due to climate change since the last ice age, an unfortunate event as a duration of 10 000 years pales in comparison of the millions evolution requires regards to the digestive system and dentition.

In those conditions to conserve animals in their natural environment is foolish and even criminal in case of endangered animals (as are most apes). The environment change faster than animals can adapt ergo if we want pandas and apes to not die, we should relocalise them in rich environments, with a wide range of fruits and preys.
It also entails, that no conclusion whatsoever can be taken from apes in captivity given what they are fed. Captive chimpanzees fare no differently. I do not know natural reserves’ animals, as many of them are managed, especially for popuplations extensively studied. But considering the extent of the Ebola crisis I can not help but conclude that they too, must eat shit.

The quantity of human interference does not matter. Even a small proportion of processed food has proved enough to wreak havock on our nervous balance and immune system.

We must investigate in each case:

• What exactly (or on average) is the average food diversity available in most reserves or populations studied ?
• What proportion of domesticated vs wild varieties can they access ?

Jane Goodall wrote how chimpanzees would seek out the staff’s feces to eat them. In our experience, animals are very attracted to feces from humans eating cooked food, due to their abnormal scent, and ingesting them excites them considerably. Same thing for any human waste, and cooked food.

• Do you know if that still happens ? Would it even be recorded ?
• Is it still common (as it once was) for staff members to share their leftovers with apes ?

And all that aside, as a general rule if animals are fed anything processed, they will undeniably suffer the same consequences as men.

For each particular case of disease related, one can easily point at glaring disturbances in the environment. The single, overarching cause, being pollution of any kind, plastic heavy metals industrial coumpounds or anything men can’t help but developped Üntermensch can’t help but diffuse wherever they live.

The case of the Mayaro⁴ Virus in French Guyana illustrates this sadly well.

Ebola

And Ebola has been heavily linked to deforestation⁵.
We are not talking small, arguably primitive animals. These are the peek of vertebrate evolution, bonobos being the closest thing to us. It’s been observed numerous times than an excess of something natural, would often lead to symptoms not too dissimilar, to eating the processed or cooked version of that thing. In particular excess of domestic meat, and also fish (including wild ones). The lack of varieties (of a wide enough food range) weakens the body all the same, with upsurges of autoimmunity such as joints hurting.

It is no secret that if an animal will instinctively smell around for hectares in order to find the one thing he prefers, never having that luxury is bound to bring some health issues. We are inextricably tied to the environment we evolved in, on a physiological level.

While they can tolerate it, our wider evolutionary line apes did not evolve for dry areas like savanna. But too much aridity will drastically reduce the biodiversity, and available food range, which, as animals lack the foresight and intelligence to move accross a whole country to get back in the forest, trap them inside a constant state of weakness… Which parasites and viruses are designed to screen out.

Anthrax and Drought

Those fires are visible from space in the infrared, indicating that Africa is literally burning as you read those words, all year long.
How much of that aridity is due to the presence of man ?
Necessarily, a lot of it ! Even the Sahara, only took off to the extent it does today, around the Egyptian pre-dynastic period, 5,500 - 3,100 BC. Before, a lush climate reigned, hosting lions, crocodiles, hypopotamus and other animals. If this could be said of the desert, then how much more humid were equatorial regions ?

In the past week, the Global Forest Watch website, with data from the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite reported about 61,661 fire alerts in Angola. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, on the other hand, about 102,738 VIIRS fire alerts were published in the same week, from June 18 to June 25 [ - 2020 - ] .
At this time of the year, fires of this magnitude are quite frequent as farmers, in preparation for the new agricultural season, clear old crops by burning them to prepare the land for new plants. This method involves burning the leftovers of old crops in an attempt to get rid of shrubs and unwanted grass on the land. This action restores nutrients to the ground and enables the growth of edible plants in the ensuing planting season.

This form of agriculture called “Slash and burn” is mostly practised in regions abundant with grasslands and rainforest. It is common in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and northern South America. The slash and burn ritual is economical for farmers, and it dates to 12,000 years ago. Its economic value stands as it eliminates the need for large farming equipment for land clearing.

In fact it is absolutely necessary in many places, as tropical humus are very poor and shallow, despite all the biodiversity, as the soil is highly acidic, making nutrients absorption of nutrients very difficult for roots, and the type of clay particles present has a poor ability to trap nutrients and stop them from washing away, while the high volume of rain in tropical rainforests washes nutrients out of the soil more quickly than in other climates.

Lastly the high temperature and moisture of tropical rainforests cause dead organic matter in the soil to decompose more quickly than in other climates, thus releasing and losing its nutrients rapidly. When farmers cut down tropical rainforests and use its soil to try to grow crops, they find little success because of the poor nature of the soil.

Because of agriculture and the incapacity of people under cooking to savour original super-food (the nectar and ambroisy of the gods), we destroyed huge swaths of sensitive forest areas where before animals and pre-cooking humans could find all the variety they would need.

Beside, forests maintain wetter climates not only locally, but globally as well helping cloud formation by emitting in the athmosphere molecules which become kernels of nucleation. The same clouds, also reflect more light from the sun, reducing temperature.

While carnivores (the top of the food chain) concentrate the pollution from their prey, grazing animals (herbivores) however seem to be more dependent on plant variety (no wonder) for their health:

In places plant diversity can be reduced to almost zero and conditions are wholly inhospitable for life:⁶

Pathological Behaviors

From metapsychoanalysis, was derived the notion of metapsychic evolutionary principle, and which serves as an heuristic to put in perspective animal behaviors, how likely they are for a given species of a given intelligence and lifespan (in short, its stature on the evolutive ladder) and what eventual discrepancies from expectations could teach us.

We view possessing polymorphic sexual instincts (like ours) unrelated to breeding, as an evidence of metapsychic evolution, as the potent sexual drive is transcended and put to a better use. While we perceive intelligent yet immoderately unreasonable or vicious species as evolutionary dead-ends in the grand scheme of things. Natural selection might produce all sorts of combinations in terms of species-wide personality traits, instincts and cognitive abilities. Not all of these might make sense on a higher level than the immediate survival of the species.
Staying within a restrictive reductionist perspective, other elements factor in the continual survival of a species along millions of years up to geological times.

A species might be well endowed for its immediate environment, but not adapted enough to support any ensuing ecological change of any kind, local as well as global. On the opposite, species endowed with a general capacity for physiological or behavioral adaptations (in one individual or a few generations) like those trees featuring diverse ecotypes for the same genetics depending on the altitude, from small corpses to very tall trees. The issue is, one can assume such adaptations to pack a lot of information, taking a long gradual time to produce… meaning this kind of adaptation at initial low levels of development might be quite poorly responsive to too strong selective pressures, if we only considered neodarwinist mechanisms.

Yet, there might exist another kind of incompatibility in the long run. When contemplating species like orca, which allegedly savagely hunt and kill dolphin (though never humans, strangely enough). We tend to expect intelligence to acknowledge intelligence, not consider it as food. An reason would be a lack of instinct to prey on us, not having evolved in our vicinity. However lower predators (cats, weasels) usually have no issue munching entirely new preys to extinction whenever transported to new islands.

No species whose intelligence borders on our own to some capacity, mainly cetaceans, elephants and great apes, ever considered us as a food, despite often a consistent overwhelming physical disadvantage on our side. Simply put: monkey sees us, monkey bigger, monkey should tear our arms out and eat them.

Yet it doesn’t happen.

We would expect constant cruelty or unscrupulousness to be strongly associated with a strictly breeding-minded sexual behavior. Indeed a hardcoded predatory mindset goes hand in hand with a highly territorial, highly competitive nature, while mating behaviors are seasonale (matching oestrus cycles closely), see fights over partners and little long-lasting relationships - beyond sometimes - those limited to a couple raising their offspring.

Despite boasting a bigger brain than dolphins, orcas match those boxes well, whereas dolphins (while still predating on fish) show both a lot more empathy and social complexity, and a sexuality much the same as bonobos’, save for the anatomical differences. Orkas’s playful nature regards to food (much like a cat) hasn’t really been observed for dolphins either.

This essential bipartition based on the attitude toward love, pervades all of our understanding of evolution and psychology, human and non-human alike, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise, if - as we believe - the spiritual layer of reality and its comprehension indeed is the most important thing in life, the very purpose of life (intelligent life in particular) in the long run, of existence itself.

It is bound to be reflected by evolution: species don’t just become spiritual because. It comes with a few requirements, which might or might not come up as probable or easy to check, as natural evolution readily rewards opportunistic, amoral tendencies.

One should expect older intelligent species (which could isolate themselves from predation-based natural-selection for some time) to align with some moral standards, with time, and most sapient species at any given time to show some control over their opportunistic tendencies, merely by virtue of evolutionary pressures.

In the end, extrasensory abilities are the single most generalist and powerful adaption any genre could muster, ultimately allowing survival despite any odds through prescient perception of dangers, up to (as some humans show, and in the past all Neanderthals) an absolute domination of the planet, the environment, and the laws of physics themselves. The problem is, it takes very specific conditions to advance to the point of sustaining its continuous improvement.

Unless your whole group is nice too, ruthlessness tends to be more adaptative as it grants dominance, without which one ends up childess, dooming that genetic progress a mutant may represent.

Which is why I get particularly angsty and tensed, when I read about wild animals showing very perplexing - downright insane - behaviors, spitting not only at the face of evolution as we understand it, but of our personal experience of raw animals too.

Justifying Alcoholism

Constantly news media relate stories of drunken animals, with the obvious intent to clear our conscience, ascribing our addiction to alcohol not to people being utter degenerates (who would survive a week in the wild) but accusing nature itself of having made us potential drunkards. There could not be a better copout strategy than finding drunk animals.
Even if half those cases are fake and the remaining highly misguiding, and we will show it. It wouldn’t even warrant my time writing this, if a number of scientists too had not been called to accredit those myths.

The problem is similar to that of drugs or other natural psychotropic/psychogenic substances. It can be summed up in 3 points:

1. Does it exist in wild nature in a concentration great enough to produce any physiological effect ?
2. If so are animals instinctively guarded against too high a concentration ?
3. Can they acquire a preference for it, if so in what conditions ?

We will start with alcohol, the most easily - relatively speaking - psychoactive chemical compound, as a natural product of sugar fermentation in fruits, nectar or sap.
Indeed the first question one must wonder even assuming all mammals had an automatic appeal for alcohol, is: could we even enough to get drunk ?
Obviously that will depend on several factor, not just dietary availability (with primates, the amount of fruits rotting on the ground), but the composition of said fermented/alcoholic food in the animal’s diet, and its metabolic rate. By virtue of natural selection, animals routinely eating a big proportion of sugar (especially if susceptible to ferment) will have have a bigger liver relative to their size, and higher levels of Alcohol Dehydrogenases (ADH), the enzymes responsible for breaking down ethanol.

And the physiological tolerance to alcohol concentration in our blood also differ, so that only experimental results can decide what does or not cause ebriety.

Assuming an uncontrolled natural disposition for it, for megafauna (animals our size or bigger) to get drunk one would require enormous amount of fermented fruits at the same place and time incompatible with any notion of instinctive regulation, so that an automatic vomitive reflex would kick in before the alcohol level could rise in any capacity. It is a fact that natural food almost never reach beer-levels of ethanol, let alone degrees higher than 3%.
So in any case to argue an hypothetical taste for a 1 to 1.5% degree in food still wouldn’t account for humans’ addiction or taste to the likes of cidar (3%) beer (4.2%) whine (5%) sake (15%) or whisky (40%). The tolerance to a certain substance selected by evolution has to reflect the conditions found in our environment, which never included anything higher than 2% at the very worst in any appreciable quantity. Therefore no evolutionary argument can explain a taste for alcohol beverage.

Only the paradoxal physiological state induced by cooking, plus the early anihilation of our dietary instinct could, plus a strong cultural psycho-cultural conditioning to do away with the inborn aversion every child experiences. That is why captive primates have been seen liking some level of alcohol:

Considering that:

• The constant digestive unease cooked food brings
• The allegued digestive effect of alcohol at low-level⁷ (accelerating digestion and gut mobility, in simple words pooping)
• The capacity of animals with big brains (non-human primates) to offset more immediate reactions in order to repeat a positive outcome they experienced
• the suppression of alliesthesy, the important digestive discomfort and heavy ssleep cooked food brings about
  I think those poor sods fed on biscuits instead of seeking tipsiness simply sought the momentaneous relief from permanent intestinal discomfort and the speeding up the expulsion of denatured molecules that a definite amount of alcohol provided.

Secondly, the precise regulation in ethanol consommation observed might allude to a certain dose of fermentation (indicated by ethanol) being not just benign but desirable, due to us having adapted to it. Some even spontaneously forms in our guts. The monkeys may have just sought to compensate for the lack of it in their lab diet.

Typically, children learn to break open aversion barriers to coffee and alcohol by masking their taste with sugar, prefering sweat beers or cidar to wine. Sugar + ethanol might as well explain why people start drinking, the combination unconsciously reminding their body of fermented fruits.

Integral rawfoodists keep that alliesthetic disgust for fruits even slightly too fermented, meaning that beer-level fermentation just isn’t attractive in the slightest for wild primates, quite the opposite.

Despite of good predictions and evidences so far, the drunken monkey hypothesis is laughable, because such low concentrations do not compare at all with that of our drinks.
The second arguments doesn’t hold water either nor would it be justified by evolution, as by definition an hypothetical feeding stimulant effect could not be inherent to a simple chemical such as alcohol but would have developed as an adaptive response. However simply eating more has no value whatsoever, we eat when we must, how much we must, and we’re very picky at it. All creatures down to the simplest bacteria are wired with this drive, the strongest in existence. It needs no outside incentive to kick in or remind the animal that it should it.

Both bees and vertebrates show (except the rare few species surviving on a single source of course), show very specific preferences. Even total predators will choose with great care the parts to ingest (innards over anything else). Bees will favor some species of flowers over others.
Calories (for the overwhelming majority of vertebrates) are not the most important for one’s equilibrium, they represent only one need: energy. We tolerate occasional or even chronic low amounts very well, regulating our activity and metabolic rate as a consequence. Calories, for primates at least, definitely are not the limiting factors in their diet, unlike vitamins and the thousands of micronutrients.

Ergo by virtue of evolution no animals (except perhaps extreme specialists) that lived with a given food range (or anything remotely close on the molecular level) for a few tens of thousand years could develop in contact with a given food range can develop to associate automatically (bypassing alliesthetic regulations) a specific food component to a reward circuit.

Mammals

But exposition of the cocktail of thousands of new chemical compounds each cooking recipes magnifies reward circuits a hundred times, creating evolutionary counter-intuitive though a powerful dependency neurologically identical to that of drugs:

Unsurprisingly these studies (yes, plural) raised a whole lot of controversies, since it amounts to calling nearly everyone liking sweets a druggie.
These conclusions provoked many outraged reactions:

Tom Sanders, emeritus professor of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London said that it was “absurd to suggest that sugar is addictive like hard drugs.”
While it is true that a liking for sweet things can be habit-forming it is not addictive like opiates or cocaine, said Sanders. Individuals do not get withdrawal symptoms when they cut sugar intake.

Except that people very high on industrial sugar totally do. This kind of criticism smells a lot like a defense mechanism to me ! How on Earth does the relative peace of getting one’s dose at regular interval proving that it’s not a drug ? People are addicts to tobacco and it doesn’t seem to alter their personality as long as they can smoke whenever they want. Remove it and things change.

Robert Lustig, professor of paediatrics at the University of California San Francisco said he shared the concerns of DiNicolantonio and colleagues. I do believe that sugar is addictive, based on its metabolic and hedonic properties he said. Lustig has previously argued that sugar is the alcohol of the child. However, while he said he believed sugar was a drug of abuse, he considered it a weak one, on a par with nicotine, rather than drugs like heroin.

I agree, cooking as a whole appears much harder to withdraw from than mere just white sugar (or saccharine). It may be essentially socio-psychological - arguably ? - but to master the will to forgo all recipes and follow one’s instinct is more difficult than to stop drinking or smoking, one paar with cocain addiction. As for the preference for natural sources of alcohol in the wild, no study was every conducted.

Studies of inborn preference of alcohol in the wild for higher vertebrates are absent. We do have a study about chimpanzees in the wild but with proper alcohol, and not in a form we could possibly ever evolve to regulate. Fermented fruits lie on the ground every now and then. But this ?

Fermented sap on the other hand lies outside the range of what could occur in nature, and requires a human artifice to brew. Chimpanzees drink sap from the tree, never brewing for a minute, let alone a week. A minute of reasoning should suffice to realize that evolution was in no way required to guard us against fermented sap, no more than against any other form of brewage impossible to find in nature.

As all forms of processing brewing is likely to bypass natural regulations. So to assume from the behavior of wild chimps eating who-knows-what that the common ancestors of all primates developed an inborn tendency for alcoholism goes beyond stupidity, into the realm of willful deceit of public opinion.

Birds

Some birds have a very specialized diet, consisting mostly if not totally on fruits. So like the treeshrews, they evolved to ingest digest and excrete in a matter of an hour up to the equivalent of a man of 70 kg eating 14 kg at once, not even throughout the day. Their metabolism, as per the requirements of constant flight as well as thermogenesis (in both case the smaller the less efficient energy-wise) is - as general rule - much faster than mammals’, and the smaller the faster.
Hence for a given feeding/digestion time they will be in contact with a lot more alcohol per gram of body mass than would frugivores among mammals. Then those levels quickly dwindle as the ethanol (then more importantly, its toxic subproduct acetaldehyde) breaks down assaulted by enzymes.

But do birds always cope with their diet ? Natural selection would say Yes of course duh but people keep reporting slews of wild birds dropping from the sky, running into windows and cars, singing on the street in groups oblivious to human, unable to fly off. Seemingly completely hammered. And people love to report it, incriminating fermenting berries.

See the New York Times, in 2018, giving io this self-conforting popular telltale of drunken birds.
Scientifics have been debating for decades by now, owning to the difficulty of analyzing the lots of dead or allegued drunken birds by foresensic pathologists, in order to ascertain common causes of possibly unrelated accidents. One difficulty lies in the variety of species involved⁸.

In some cases, the science is settled:

That behavior alone, ethanol-induced stupor or not, doesn’t seem normal at all. Both populations and needs should be tailored to the quantities and diversity of food, so that animals shouldn’t feel any such rush, not to the point of killing themselves, when less ripe fruits exist. If for some reason in tens or hundreds of thousands of years that very parameter (availability of ripe berries) did not change, then birds would adapt to eat on less riped ones. And coevolution - birds spreading seeds by shitting them - would favor species ripening earlier or longer.
The fact it didn’t happen, means that there used to be enough food so that such selection pressure couldn’t increase.
It doesn’t take a galaxy-brain to realize that in the past, a mere 50 years ago, urbanization in the US wasn’t nearly as extensive and intensive as today. There were a lot more trees, more diverse too, the farther back in time we go… up to the Holocene’s onset, the Younger Drias Boundary .

So, environmental depredation, as usual.

It is possible too that in some cases some birds fall back on back on less appealing, too fermented berries pushing the with health consequences. Maybe.
How much of them is highly debatable and was debated to death.

To conclude with this:
Lots of hypotheticals, we do not know what levels would produce what effect exactly - we cannot translate directly in blood levels either, hence not compare directly with humans. In this sample we can conclude that intoxication may likely have contributed, though overeating and sugar levels might have factored more (or even solely) in these deaths.

And no one ever showed that (wild) birds prefer fermented berries so in no way did these happenings ever help condone our alcoholism:

Either birds aren’t drunk, or chose the wrong fruits by mistake (highly improbable) or were forced to rely on them out of necessity.

Apes

In 2004 has been published Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts by Wrangham & Wilson, according to which the regularity and pattern of killings in chimpanzees reveal a vicious, demonic (the term is theirs) and violent male nature, bent on treating females like resource, and resort to bloodbath whenever it seems advantageous for their selfish interest. Are chimpanzee males driven by the love of their group and the wish to get along like we would expect (a bit naively perhaps ?) any evolved critter (such as intelligent aliens) to behave ?

In 2010 as a responses to criticisms regards to these ideas (already quite clear) in Chimpanzee violence is a serious topic: A response to Sussman and Marshack’s critique of Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, they stated:

Coalitionary killings among chimpanzees are certainly rare. Nevertheless current estimates suggest that they occur at a frequency not very different from war deaths among human pre-state societies (which themselves occur at a substantially higher rate than war deaths in twentieth-century industrial nations, Keeley 1996).
In a survey of nine study communities in the five longest-studied populations of chimpanzees with more than one community, Wrangham et al (2006) reported that the median risk of violent death for chimpanzees from inter-community killing (69-287 per 100,000 per year) fell in the same order of magnitude as the median reported values for rates of death from warfare among subsistence-society hunters and farmers (164 and 595 per 100,000 per year, respectively).

Except the frequency in primitive societies has been very overestimated.

Lowe et al. arrived at similar conclusions regarding infanticides as the product of inherently evil males, specifically targetting unweaned infants as lactation stops female fertility⁹.
But their conclusions based on very few cases given the duration considered, and on what amounts to nitpicking:

Of the 35 intra-community infanticides reported by Wilson et al. (2014), excluding those from our study site (the Budongo Forest Reserve, Uganda), in eight instances the attackers were male, in six instances they were female, while both sexes were attackers in two instances; the sex of the attackers was unknown in the remaining 19 cases. Male infants were killed more frequently than female infants (19 versus seven incidences, respectively).

A 10:8 male-to-female attackers ratio, over merely 35 individuals, does not bear any statistical signicance. While the slightly more significant male-to-female victims ratio is not taken into account. There is a simple explanation, which though I can not prove by lack of data, is nevertheless an absolute certitude: we have been feeding shit to animals from 1975 onward, in most observation sites, or at least those featuring murders.
This much has been confessed by none other than Jane Goodall, which had already before then, beeng going on with her observations for 14 years, and consistently described them the same as we do with bonobos: uniformly gentle, pacifistic, collectivist (caring for the group more beyond one’s self-interest), joyously sharing females and vice versa.

Then, she started limited human-controlled feeding, which significantly changed their behavior from pacifism to aggressivity, competitiveness, opportunistic violence, as related by Robert Sussmann. Typically, from then on males started being described as fighting over females like bulls, with females barely keeping the group together and outright wars erupting, be it inter- or intra-community.

In that condition, given our genetic proximity fed chimpanzees (or otherwise presented with an appallingly poor dietary variety, sufficient to make them all die from Ebola) will naturally feature similar degrees of aggression as that of neolithic humans. Instead of settling on this most parcimonious hypothesis, which would also explain why some primitive societies (and thus, chimpanzees) vary sometimes considerably in their war-like tendencies due to their diet and related erratic nature of psychological pathologie, the proponents of the male intrinsic evilness focus on unconclusive studies and disregard the statistical variation (about murders) both among human primitive socities as mostly random or the proof that muh culture can combat the demon inside.

Other indices of chimps not being in their natural state include frenetic, mindless breeding behaviors absolutely typical of cooking feedback:

The contrast is too striking, this breeding and aggression overdrive are characteristic of cooking feedback. The fact some communities show no violence whatsoever while some others are legit batshit insane has no other explanation.
Some promoted the idea of local ape cultures, that young chimpanzees when raised in, could adopt and thus display a slew of varied behaviors all within the range of what is genetically possible for them.

But I disagree with this idea too: the separation of nature and culture in humans is a dire mistake, stemming from cooked food. Cultures as we know them should not exist.
To be precise material cultures (habits pertaining to tool-use) of course need to be learnt over time, and some ape populations show different habits. But slightly different food sources shouldn’t impact psychology and instincts in the slightest: these are a direct product from genes. Humans vary so much in personality doesn’t come from our superior intelligence or whatnot but is pathological, caused by diversified cooked diets, their chaotic effects on the nervous system and equally chaotic interactions with innate personality traits. Lastly, gradually socially-expected norms decant in the form of cultures with its bells and whistles.

What we have been observing for decades is the alteration of behaviors with any form of processed food (the more processed the worse) compared to raw paleolithic food, so, imitating wild animals. For us humans, it meant imitating chimpanzees.
From our perspectives, it is very likely that the entire world’s been afflicted with low levels of pollution, plastic bits or otherwise, altering maybe considerably, natural behaviors. Me and a bunch of other individuals have been observing this within the context of alternative diets, both on our persons (actually, thousands of people, though most were more concerned with diet than with psychogenic effects) and animals alike.
Molecular stress (any unnatural amount of molecules not found in the species’ natural environment or diet) appeared to almost universally make animals less alert yet more excited, with increased levels of breeding behaviors and exacerbed secondary sexual character traits like territorial dominance male aggressivity and female passivity, as shown at least for mice in Abnormal behaviours induced by chemical pollution: a review of the evidence and new challenges by Sarah M. zala & Dustin J. Penn.
Simulacra (as defined by Konrad Lorentz, displays whose real purpose is different from the real one) go completely out of control. In the case of chimpanzees simple brawls aimed at deciding new hierarchies, can change into seemingly organized murders of the kind only humans are capable of.

Until the complete natural environment (in terms of food range at least) of a population has been reconstituted to a significant degree within a perimeter, speculating about ape nature like the likes of Wrangham do is ridiculous.
Actually I am positive these people find a perverse pleasure in tarnishing the public image of animals, almost on a sexual level. I read countless articles which would put to shame tabloids like the Sun.

I believe the mainstream public is simply too eager to accept any pseudoscientific theory relieving them of the guilt borne of comparing harmonious functional primate societies with our highly dysfunctional, messed-up societies. It is easier to blame genetics and nature, than to put the effort into correcting one’s lifestyle and culture.. In 50 years there might be almost nothing left of big wild animal species, a decaying world.