This doesn’t necessarily connect to any larger point, but rabbits are… “approximately sorta” “cud” chewers?
The confident partial falsehood caught my attention on agricultural and nutritional grounds, which are kind of objectively interesting. (I had never heard about this part of the bible before.)
Only two kinds of people take religious texts seriously: atheists and fundamentalists.
2. Rabbits are not ruminants. They have no cud to chew.
Mechanistically, the problem that rabbits face is that their digestive system is quite similar to humans (with a small intestine first, and then a larger intestine) but their diet is NOT similar to humans.
We get all kinds of vitamins (esp B12) and absorb it in the small intestine directly after grinding it up in a pretty cursory way.
Humans get to not care about bad absorption at the end of our GI tract because the first stretch of our GI tract is good enough when steak is so yummy and full of vitamins and we can hunt and farm n’stuff! <3
Rabbits face the same design challenge, but rabbits don’t have high quality food… eg they don’t eat steak. They eat vegetarian crap. And they can’t buy B12 vitamins at the hippy store either.
So to make up for the limited diet, plus a human-like GI tract, rabbits generate special “first pass poops” that they emit mostly at night called “cecotropes” and then they eat those.
The virtue here is that this specialized nutrient rich feces goes through the small intestine a second time, so the interesting nutrients (that were only really properly unlocked by fermentation in the colon, with help from gut microbiomes that have bigger genomes and crazier digestive chemistry) can finally be absorbed! <3
Cecotropes are not pieces of “cud”… exactly?
True ruminants chew cud for slightly different reasons than rabbits. Both are struggling with annoyingly low quality food, and both need to process it a lot, and both end up sending many of the same atoms through their mouth more than once… but then… there are some differences too, like the chemistry is slightly different, and “whether it came out of the butt or was thrown up” is different. (Both seem gross to me, but… nature is gonna nature, you know?)
The rabbits don’t actually care about it being in their mouth… that’s just the only way to get it further down to the the part of the GI tract that is really good at absorbing nutrients (but couldn’t absorb it on the first pass).
Maybe the language of the bible didn’t even HAVE a word for “cecotropes”?
If I was going to connect this back to some larger point here about “literary interpretation” that Harris and Peterson were making? Uh...
For me, it is reasonable to treat all human mouth sounds (and writing) as “requiring literary interpretation” because of things similar to this cecotrope/cud distinction.
The physical reality over time is the thing pointed to.
The words are… just pointers, and often aren’t very precise in contexts where people have high trust, and highly shared context, and care about each other, and want to be parsimonious and helpful in their “pointer sharing”.
I guess a deeper point is that most of Harris’s points about religion could be leveled at science as well?
IF (purely hypothetically here, of course) there was some crazy group of half-bad humans (and which humans do NOT have some badness in them?) that formed into a tribe, and got in a resource conflict with another tribe, and they had a bunch of “Science Texts” full of non-generalizingnon-replicating “supposedly literally true” claims… THEN they might do some pretty heinous shit. It would stand to reason that it is possible.
Whether the tribe claims to be doing “Science” or claims to be “Religion” it is all basically just words-words-words from “long ago” that might be true, or might have seemed true in some ancient context, but also you really should probably nullius in verba the moment the words suggest “common sense bad action” or “things that seem factually or heuristically doubtful and could be tested again from scratch”.
My favored “nullius in verba” schtick is not even that hard to follow, what with search engines and all.
I don’t know what the jewish dietary laws are here, but capybara also chew “cud” in a way that’s probably highly similar to rabbits, and if jewish smarty-pants are sensible (and… why wouldn’t they be?) then my guess is that they consider capybaras to have the same kosher/not-kosher status as rabbits? Maybe? (I checked: yup!)
“Pics or it didn’t happen” is not the BEST epistemology possible, and it was impossible prior to cheap photography, but there are certainly worse epistemologies.
Maybe the language of the bible didn’t even HAVE a word for “cecotropes”?
I like this theory. The authors of the Old Testament were herders. They interacted with animals all the time. They knew knew animal behavior backward and forward.
There’s an ancient rabbinic saying that “The Torah spoke in the language of men”—that is, when faced with confusing language in the bible, one should look at what the common vernacular was at the time that it was written. I should note that historically not everyone has agreed with that thesis, but it’s the majority opinion in Orthodox Jewish circles when trying to figure out practical issues like this one. If you want to learn more about how Jewish theology treats this and similar issues dealing with animals and seemingly impossible legends, I highly recommend the writings of Rabbi Natan Slifkin (though his particular views are sometimes considered controversial).
On 5 October 2008 Slifkin published an essay entitled In Defense of My Opponents in which he acknowledges that there is a reasonable basis for a ban on his books in certain communities.
That amount of upside down chutzpah is fantastic <3
Yeah, Slifkin is great. If you want a steelmanned version of the view against his perspective btw, I recommend “Torah, Chazal, and Science,” by Rabbi Moshe Meiselman. He takes a really interesting fundamentalist, but also very scholarly view that I haven’t really heard spelled out explicitly elsewhere.
People can often eat the higher quality food directly instead of feeding it to animals, which matters if food is scarce or expensive. On the other hand, if you want to convert grass to calories for humans, feeding it to a cow is a pretty reasonable way to do it.
This doesn’t necessarily connect to any larger point, but rabbits are… “approximately sorta” “cud” chewers?
The confident partial falsehood caught my attention on agricultural and nutritional grounds, which are kind of objectively interesting. (I had never heard about this part of the bible before.)
Mechanistically, the problem that rabbits face is that their digestive system is quite similar to humans (with a small intestine first, and then a larger intestine) but their diet is NOT similar to humans.
We get all kinds of vitamins (esp B12) and absorb it in the small intestine directly after grinding it up in a pretty cursory way.
Then grassy/cellulose junk that humans eat goes the the large intestine for fermentation (hence humans farting), but that final end of our GI tract is bad at absorption. (Empirically, high fiber and its resulting hindgut bacterial growth are still better for health than not… it just lacks the raw sufficiency that is available to other species with different GI tract designs.)
Humans get to not care about bad absorption at the end of our GI tract because the first stretch of our GI tract is good enough when steak is so yummy and full of vitamins and we can hunt and farm n’stuff! <3
Rabbits face the same design challenge, but rabbits don’t have high quality food… eg they don’t eat steak. They eat vegetarian crap. And they can’t buy B12 vitamins at the hippy store either.
So to make up for the limited diet, plus a human-like GI tract, rabbits generate special “first pass poops” that they emit mostly at night called “cecotropes” and then they eat those.
The virtue here is that this specialized nutrient rich feces goes through the small intestine a second time, so the interesting nutrients (that were only really properly unlocked by fermentation in the colon, with help from gut microbiomes that have bigger genomes and crazier digestive chemistry) can finally be absorbed! <3
Cecotropes are not pieces of “cud”… exactly?
True ruminants chew cud for slightly different reasons than rabbits. Both are struggling with annoyingly low quality food, and both need to process it a lot, and both end up sending many of the same atoms through their mouth more than once… but then… there are some differences too, like the chemistry is slightly different, and “whether it came out of the butt or was thrown up” is different. (Both seem gross to me, but… nature is gonna nature, you know?)
The rabbits don’t actually care about it being in their mouth… that’s just the only way to get it further down to the the part of the GI tract that is really good at absorbing nutrients (but couldn’t absorb it on the first pass).
Maybe the language of the bible didn’t even HAVE a word for “cecotropes”?
If I was going to connect this back to some larger point here about “literary interpretation” that Harris and Peterson were making? Uh...
For me, it is reasonable to treat all human mouth sounds (and writing) as “requiring literary interpretation” because of things similar to this cecotrope/cud distinction.
The physical reality over time is the thing pointed to.
The words are… just pointers, and often aren’t very precise in contexts where people have high trust, and highly shared context, and care about each other, and want to be parsimonious and helpful in their “pointer sharing”.
I guess a deeper point is that most of Harris’s points about religion could be leveled at science as well?
IF (purely hypothetically here, of course) there was some crazy group of half-bad humans (and which humans do NOT have some badness in them?) that formed into a tribe, and got in a resource conflict with another tribe, and they had a bunch of “Science Texts” full of non-generalizing non-replicating “supposedly literally true” claims… THEN they might do some pretty heinous shit. It would stand to reason that it is possible.
Whether the tribe claims to be doing “Science” or claims to be “Religion” it is all basically just words-words-words from “long ago” that might be true, or might have seemed true in some ancient context, but also you really should probably nullius in verba the moment the words suggest “common sense bad action” or “things that seem factually or heuristically doubtful and could be tested again from scratch”.
My favored “nullius in verba” schtick is not even that hard to follow, what with search engines and all.
I don’t know what the jewish dietary laws are here, but capybara also chew “cud” in a way that’s probably highly similar to rabbits, and if jewish smarty-pants are sensible (and… why wouldn’t they be?) then my guess is that they consider capybaras to have the same kosher/not-kosher status as rabbits? Maybe? (I checked: yup!)
The reason I had a pretty good hunch here is that it was trivial to find visual evidence of a capybara eating cecotropes on youtube (its a little bit gross, but not suuuuper gross).
“Pics or it didn’t happen” is not the BEST epistemology possible, and it was impossible prior to cheap photography, but there are certainly worse epistemologies.
I like this theory. The authors of the Old Testament were herders. They interacted with animals all the time. They knew knew animal behavior backward and forward.
Also known as: the categories were made for man.
There’s an ancient rabbinic saying that “The Torah spoke in the language of men”—that is, when faced with confusing language in the bible, one should look at what the common vernacular was at the time that it was written. I should note that historically not everyone has agreed with that thesis, but it’s the majority opinion in Orthodox Jewish circles when trying to figure out practical issues like this one. If you want to learn more about how Jewish theology treats this and similar issues dealing with animals and seemingly impossible legends, I highly recommend the writings of Rabbi Natan Slifkin (though his particular views are sometimes considered controversial).
This part made me laugh out loud:
That amount of upside down chutzpah is fantastic <3
Yeah, Slifkin is great. If you want a steelmanned version of the view against his perspective btw, I recommend “Torah, Chazal, and Science,” by Rabbi Moshe Meiselman. He takes a really interesting fundamentalist, but also very scholarly view that I haven’t really heard spelled out explicitly elsewhere.
I love how <3 has the dual interpretation of a heart and a fart.
Is there a particular reason for people to prefer eating animals who eat low quality food? Health, nutrition, etc?
People can often eat the higher quality food directly instead of feeding it to animals, which matters if food is scarce or expensive. On the other hand, if you want to convert grass to calories for humans, feeding it to a cow is a pretty reasonable way to do it.
(Warning: this is erring on the side of ‘beware the person who can explain everything’.)
Said animal doesn’t necessarily have the extra nutrients available to resist / fight back / be energetic in general, for one.
Source: Ground beef from grass-fed and grain-fed cattle: Does it matter?