Some of you might have heard that bacon was rated as being as carcinogenic as smoking by the World Health Organization.
No. That did not happen.
And this is a good case for learning some modern critical thinking skills.
I’ll spoil the surprise by quoting them directly:
No, processed meat has been classified in the same category as causes of cancer such as tobacco smoking and asbestos (IARC Group 1, carcinogenic to humans), but this does NOT mean that they are all equally dangerous. The IARC classifications describe the strength of the scientific evidence about an agent being a cause of cancer, rather than assessing the level of risk.
In other words, all they said is that we are certain that “processed meats” (i.e. chemically treated meats) do cause cancer (in fact, just one cancer: colorectal cancer). They did not say it was all that bad a cause of it—certainly nowhere near as bad as smoking is of an assortment of other cancers (not only of the lung), which is dozens of times deadlier compared to an average consumption of processed meat—and most people are average consumers.
So…
First Rule of Critical Thinking Club Is: Always go to the original source and read what it actually says. The media should never be trusted to get a story right. Even less so some rando on twitter.
Second Rule of Critical Thinking Club Is: Never buy any alarmism about risk until you know how to compare the newly claimed risk to risks you already accept.
What do I mean by that?
What Risk Is That Again?
Everything kills you. Literally. Everything. It just needs quantity or time. And if you save yourself from one thing, something else will get you. Because we are mortal.
Heart disease, for example, has always remained the leading cause of death, always roughly in the ballpark of a fourth of all causes of death over the last forty years or so. One reason it always stays around that level is that if you stop or prevent all other causes of death (e.g. cancer; accident; war), your heart still fails you. Eventually it stops working. Thus we will probably never change the rate of death by heart disease very much. In fact, we would substantially increase it if we cure all other causes of death. For if nothing else can kill us but our hearts giving out from wear, then our hearts will kill us all. In that quasi-utopian world, 100% of people will die of heart disease. Yet that would actually be a sign of amazing medical progress!
Risk therefore has to be understood in this context: (1) some things are far riskier than others and (2) something will kill you eventually. So the goal is reasonable life extension: not foolishly reducing your life span (or adding decades of misery from chronic illnesses caused by risky behaviors) but also not foolishly extending it by failing to enjoy the life you have. For more years of a shitty life is worth less than less years of an excellent one. So when you get to choose, the choice is obvious. Adding one or two years to your life is not worth it if you must add decades of misery to obtain it; whereas losing a decade or more off your life, when you could be comparably happy avoiding that loss, is probably always foolish. In between is a wide grey area where you have to decide how much risk you want to take, and for what gain. It’s about how you want to live your life.
For example. We drive. Constantly. Even though we are highly likely to die from it. In the U.S., cars kill more people than guns (though guns are catching up). So we are comfortable with the risk of driving. Which is a death rate of about 10 per 100,000 per year. That’s one kind of risk measure (and you have to compare risks with the same measures). Another is to count the years off of your average life expectancy without the risk. For driving regularly, that’s in the vicinity of 1 to 2 years (more for heavier or riskier drivers).
Oh, and you also must consider, that that doesn’t always mean you get those years back if you don’t drive. Studies don’t always control for all possibilities (often because they can’t). But that’s important to do. Because if you don’t drive, you will do something else. Maybe, say, walk. Or ride a bicycle. Which also kill you. Though the death rate for these is way lower than for driving, part of the reason for that is because the population as a whole spends more hours in cars than walking or cycling. So increasing your hours on either, as you might have to do when you give up driving, will increase your death rate well above the national average.
So you can’t fully escape by avoiding driving. Even if you wanted to avoid the driving. And most people don’t. They are content with the risk.
But we shouldn’t use this as a rationalization to accept intolerably stupid risks. “I’ll keep smoking because we all die from something” is a phenomenally stupid thing to say. Not only because smoking shortens your life by at least ten years—which is a lot. But also because smoking will ruin even the life you have. My mother stopped smoking before she was forty. A decade later, emphysema still got her. Resulting in another ten and likely twenty years of considerable misery and physical disability. If you’ve ever seen what that does to a person, really seen it and lived with it…you’d quit cold turkey. Smoking is stupid. In precisely the way driving is not. Even though both kill you. One kills you at a rate five to ten times higher. And adds on top of that an equally greater risk of enduring decades of misery and disability as well.
Cut the smoking. Seriously.
So How Bad Is Bacon?
Well, okay. How does processed meat compare on this scale of concern? (And ordinary red meat, too, if it is ever upgraded in causal certainty.)
Third Rule of Critical Thinking Club Is: Always ask about any alarmist risk claim how the risk varies with exposure.
On average. Smoking sucks ten years off your life. It is thus five to ten times deadlier than ordinary driving. Smoking is also comparably more likely to disable you in some awful way for a decade or more before it kills you. But again. Five to ten times. Sixth grade math tells us: this is an increased risk of 400% to 900%. Think about that for a moment.
What is the increased risk from eating moderate amounts of processed meat? That’s 50 grams a day, or about 2 ounces, roughly four slices of fried bacon, every single day, for your whole life. Drum roll please… 18%. Hmm. Bacon, 18%. Smoking, 900%. Your eyes should be rolling by now. Generally any time someone tells you a risk increase that is less than 100%, you can probably ignore it. Because risks that low are rarely significant compared to the kinds of risks you happily accept already.
This does depend, though, on the base rate. For example, smoking’s +900% is the increased risk of death, period. That’s bad. But bacon’s +18% is really only the increased risk of colorectal cancer. Not “of death.” By anything. Much less the cancer. But the base rate of colorectal cancer is already really small. If it were huge—like, say, anywhere near the risk level of dying by driving—an 18% increase would be a matter of some concern. It would translate into a lot more knocked off your average expected lifespan than a year or two. But this is not the case here. Even if all colorectal cancer were fatal (it isn’t, though it’s bad enough to suffer through it, so I’ll consider that fact of little concern to your calculations), you will almost certainly never get it. No matter how much processed meat you eat (unless you eat such prodigious quantities as to be self-evidently foolish).
In fact, remember, whereas smoking has zero health benefits, even WHO admits “Eating meat has known health benefits.” As does alcohol (e.g. moderate wine consumption), yet alcohol causes far more cancer than processed meat. In fact, WHO found, 600,000 deaths per year worldwide vs. 34,000 deaths per year worldwide.
…Wait. Did you just hear a record player scratch to a halt?
You should have.
That’s right. WHO found that only 34,000 deaths each year are caused by eating processed meats. Um. Huh. Over 50 million people die each year. And they are freaking out over 34,000? Oh shit. Don’t look at the number killed by driving! It makes the top ten, at about 1 million deaths a year. Driving could be, by this measure, almost thirty times more likely to kill you than eating bacon. Translation: You should hardly give a fuck.
(Indeed, the variance could be greater. Because worldwide, eating processed meat may be more common than driving.)
So don’t worry about your bacon. Eat it in as much moderation as it already made sense to. And while you’re at it, maybe buy it from as ethical a meat producer as you can find (Niman Ranch, for example) or from states (e.g. California) or countries (e.g. Australia) that are pushing more humane husbandry laws. That’s a reasonable way to live.
That’s why WHO admits “consumption of processed meat was associated with small increases in the risk of cancer.” Unlike smoking. Oh so very much unlike smoking. And though they couldn’t prove red meat caused cancer, they did find that if it does, then its impact rate is 17% per 100 grams (so, same risk, at twice the consumption; or half the risk, at the same level of consumption). So even at worst, it’s equally trivial. They think “diets high in red meat could be responsible for 50,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide.” High consumption. And that only gets you to twenty times less lethal than driving (depending on how common heavy red meat diets are relative to driving worldwide, which I don’t know).
Shit. Why is this even news?
As WHO puts it:
These numbers contrast with about 1 million cancer deaths per year globally due to tobacco smoking, 600,000 per year due to alcohol consumption, and more than 200,000 per year due to air pollution.
This may look like smoking is as lethal as driving, but being the worldwide count, this will depend on variances in traffic safety, and on things like hours driven vs. cigs smoked. And, remember, that stat does not include the years of misery caused by debilitating diseases, which are also 400% to 900% more likely for smokers. And this is only counting cancer deaths from smoking, and thus leaves out, say, death by respiratory failure from terminal emphysema. Meanwhile, if as many people eat processed meats as are exposed to air pollution worldwide, it certainly looks like we should be a lot more worried about curbing air pollution than avoiding bacon. And that 200,000 is again only cancer deaths. Not respiratory failures, which are actually a more common mortality outcome from air pollution.
Perspective. We all need a good dose.
What This Tells Us about Critical Thinking
All three of these rules can be generalized beyond risk decisions to a level of greater abstraction in principles of reasoning:
- Always check the primary source of a claim. Because claims become distorted pretty quickly. Almost instantly in fact. A researcher’s own press release—sometimes even the abstract for their study—can already begin the distortion; media only make it worse; alarmist twitter randos, more so.
- Always make sure you are clear on what is being measured, and how it is being measured, and how that measure compares to everyday things. Because mistaking or not understanding these things is a major cause of error.
- Always ask how an effect varies with exposure to its cause. Because more or less of a thing can be good or bad. And outcomes change with inputs. Simply assuming the inputs never change, or can’t, is another major cause of error.
There are other aspects to this.
- Many cognitive biases innate to our brains concern an inability to accurately evaluate risk. And you have the same lousy brain as everyone else, so you aren’t exempt.
- People fall victim to standard fallacies of logic in their own thinking far more often than they admit (e.g. rationalizing a smoking habit). And people means you. You aren’t that special. You are just as prone to this as anyone.
- And decisions always require a better grasp of probability reasoning. Because expected risks and gains are all measures of probability. Yet we are rarely taught how to do this properly. Even scientists suck at it (as a famous mammography question showed). And if they suck at it, you probably suck at it.
So you might want to do something about that. Likewise with testing your own logic more. And getting more familiar with how broken your brain is.
Shit. I didn’t even intend this to become an advertisement for my online Critical Thinking Class starting next week. But it did occur to me halfway through. Hey. You might be interested in that.
🙂
Yup. Well writ.
I remember in school (late 80s, early 90s) being taught that polyunsaturated fats were the “good” fats, while monounsaturated fats were the “bad” ones. Then a couple of years ago I turn on the TV to be informed that polys were a nightmare food to be avoided at all costs. A total 180° reversal.
That was again the media distorting the more cautious reality (although sometimes the researchers themselves fostered this misrepresentation). The public ought to be taught that roughly 1 out of every 3 scientific findings will be discovered to be false. So if a study has not been replicated, it should never be reported as established, only something that needs verifying. Unless the data are amazingly good (super large sample size or large effect size), although even then some caution remains warranted. Nutrition science has famously been plagued with over-sensationalized reporting of tentative findings, and not keeping up with what is well replicated.
What’s your opinion in the morality of eating meat ? Anything you have posted on this matter ?
Yes. I wrote about that a few years ago.
Part of the confusion around this issue is the groupings used by the WHO which merely provide information on the strength of evidence available for a particular substance causing cancer. These groupings are not about potency but whether or not a substance causes cancer, no matter to what degree it does so.
The groups are
Group 1 established carcinogens (eg smoking and processed meat),
2A probably carcinogenic ( the evidence is not strong enough to place them in group 1)
2B possibly carcinogenic (evidence is even less strong but maybe hints at the substance being a carcinogen
3 Complete lack of data
So the evidence for processed meat and smoking being carcinogens is very strong (pretty much as certain as you can be) but within group 1 not all substances carry the same level of risk.
Yes. That!
A little off topic, but I had an idea about Ehrman. Ehrman argues in “How Jesus Became God” that Paul thought of Jesus as a pre-existent divine angel. But how does Ehrman reconcile this with the point Paul makes that he met Jesus’ brother James? Maybe if he was pressed on it, Ehrman would have to consider the “James passage” in Paul as an interpolation?
Too off topic here. You’ll have to ask that when I post on Jesus studies again.
Also, when they talk about the danger of certain foods, i always wonder is it the food itself that is the problem, or is it because that food is displacing a “good” food. For example, I had a large spinach salad topped with sliced tri-tip for lunch yesterday. Presumably, the health risk for that is lower (in a relative sense) than for a tri-tip sandwich with no salad, but if I had eaten the salad and left off the meat entirely, would it be a LOT less risky, or almost no difference, or somewhere in the middle? In other words, does eating the spinach make up for the risks of the meat, or do the meat risks swamp the benefits of the spinach? I’m not sure food studies take these kinds of situations into account.
Indeed.
Scientists are aware of this as a problem. Some studies I do believe look into it. But I don’t have a bibliography handy.
Dr carrier i disagree with you on dismissing 18% risk as low. Let me elaborate.
Smoking is associated with 2-3X risk of mortality compared to people who have never smoked(PMID 25671255).Keeping in mind that regular smokers are consuming 1+ packets per day. We don’t usually get the same amount of contrast in meat intake(it’s usually less) Moderate smoking(less than 1 cig/day is associated with 64% increase risk in CVD while 1-10 cigs is associated with 87%risk(PMID27918784).Compare this to a serving of processed meat per day. If we hone in on a specific Outcome like coronary heart disease(PMID29367388) light smoking is not comparable to foods like processed meat and not too far off unprocessed red meat. Plus data on smoking trends do not do a good job of adjusting for the confounders as nutritional epidemiology
Q1) Do you think light smoking increases risk of CVD?
Further, if we take the 18% risk CRC from WHO report, that translates into a little under 1% increase in absolute risk. However if we take the number 1 killer CVD and assume about 20% relative increase risk and baseline risk of 25% for the sake of argument, it would then mean about 5% absolute increase in risk. Now let’s look at smoking. Let’s say smoking can increase the risk of lung cancer by 10X for this demo. Well that only translates to an absolute risk of 1%.This is why presenting the numbers you did and dismissing ‘low’ numbers is misleading
Q2) Would you accept that CVD mortality risks of consuming processed meat are greater in absolute terms than the risk of dying due to lung cancer from Smoking?
Smoking knocks ten times more years off of your life than eating bacon. Bacon only knocks a year or two. These are not comparable outcomes. One is trivial. The other is severe. Smoking also readily causes decades of disability (e.g. emphysema); bacon does not. Etc.
If you, personally, want those one to two years, then by all means, eat as you please. But don’t go around saying everyone should share your unreasonable desires. Most people prefer a better life to a mere extra year of it. For most people, “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
And certainly don’t go around saying bacon is like smoking. It is literally not even remotely like smoking in the damage, misery, and death it causes.
I see you didn’t answer the questions I posed. Can you let me know your response to my questions.
I did answer you.
Your points are irrelevant in light of the information I returned to focus.
That doesn’t help at all. I disagreed with you on the effect size you claim to be trivial. I posed two questions along with my comment. You didn’t answer any question at all. You just restated your previous points which I disagreed with and gave reasons for it. I don’t see how my response is irrelevant in the light of information. I’ll make it clear again.
Q1) Do you think light smoking increases risk of CVD?
Q2) Q2) Would you accept that CVD mortality risks of consuming processed meat are greater in absolute terms than the risk of dying due to lung cancer from Smoking?
As I said:
The risk of all-cause mortality from smoking is, in average years of life-expectancy lost, ten times greater than for daily eating of processed (and only processed) meat. So on Q2: nope.
The answer to Q1 therefore does not matter. It’s still an all-cause 10:1 difference in mortality. Obsessing over one single diagnosis has no bearing on this.
New Lesson: Someone just pointed me to a similar article at Reason.comm, a Libertarian publication. Notably, despite being skeptical, it is not skeptical of the media, but turns it into skepticism of science and international projects like WHO, and thus turns this into an anti-UN and anti-science narrative. All by falsely reporting what the WHO study said. They lead with:
Um. No. WHO never said that. Where is Reason.com getting the words in quotes? WHO said instead that “processed meat was associated with small increases in the risk of cancer” and outright said that it resulted in comparatively few deaths worldwide compared to major carcinogens. So why does Reason.com fail to read the actual study it is trying to debunk and correctly report the facts and identify the real culprit, the media? Because Reason.com is not big on critical thinking. They violated the First Rule of Critical Thinking Club. And then let their anti-science, anti-internationalist bias run rampant, unchecked by introspection, or facts.
Don’t do that.
Incidentally, I can’t find the origin of Reason.com’s “quote.” If it didn’t come from WHO, who penned it? Did Reason.com just fabricate a quote??
Is this another “hello untrustworthy media”?
It looks like they did. Reason.com stole the line from earlier news reports that used the subline “processed meat ranks alongside smoking as a major cause of cancer,” but not in quotation marks, and thus not attributed as a direct quote of WHO. And this appears to originate possibly at the Guardian UK, whose reporter failed to understand the difference between ranking the certainty of causation and ranking the severity of cause. Reason.com just put quotes around it to make it look like it was quoting WHO, when in fact it was quoting prior news stories, stories that were science illiterate and getting the story wrong.
Reason is a Koch bros. propaganda outlet. They even had a special Holocaust denial edition in 1976 : https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-racist-history-heres-a-copy-of-its-holocaust-denial-special-issue/
Nice.
Thanks for that link.
The figures you quote only apply to humans. Consumption of bacon is one of the top three causes of mortality in domesticated pigs, the other two being ham and pork.
Consumption of salad also is a high mortality factor for carrots and lettuce.
Pig lives don’t have any inherent value (as distinct from assigned value). No more than carrots. Or trees. Which can also have assigned value but have no inherent value. Inherent value comes from the valuer, valuing themselves and their own lives. Unlike carrots and trees, pigs can experience suffering and some levels of awareness and decision-making. But that pertains to how they live their lives. Not why they live them. They aren’t people. They are not a way for the universe to know itself. They do not and will never possess cognitive knowledge of themselves or the universe. They are not waiting to write a novel or philosophize or contemplate being alive or being in love. They are incapable of cognitively valuing things, like life, theirs or anyone else’s. They don’t even know what life is. Nor will they come to. They can feel joy. And they can suffer. But death ends suffering, it does not cause it. So the mortality of pigs is not relevant. Humanitarian husbandry is.
Why are you so confident about this? We as humans are not even smart enough to know how smart animals are: https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals-ebook/dp/B016APOCRA/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
That’s an illogical statement. You can’t claim humans are simultaneously not smart enough to know something and smart enough to know it.
But “smart” is not relevant here. Intelligence has nothing to do with cognitive self-modeling. Even my desktop computer is incredibly smart. And we’ve built robots smarter still. They still aren’t self-conscious.
Poor circulation due to build up of plaque in arteries can cause all sorts of maladies: macular degeneration, hearing loss, strokes, heart attacks, aneurysms, kidney failure, bowel infarction, degenerative disks, gangrene, impotence, multiple sclerosis, and arthritis. Diseases like Type-2 diabetes can be cured through diet and the American Diabetes Association admits the low fat vegan diet is the most effective. It makes sense to keep your arteries as clean as possible, and that can only be done with a very low fat, vegan diet. Meat has too much fat in it – even those meats touted as being 1% fat, because that is not the percentage of caloric fat, but the fat by weight. The fat calories can be more like 1/3 to ½ fat in beef, pork and chicken as compared to total calories.
Only one diet has been proven to reverse heart disease and that is the low fat (7% to 10% fat) vegan diet. Since so many diseases are circulatory diseases, and men given a “clean bill of health” are dropping dead at age 45 from heart attacks, we know we need more than “eating moderately” in order to protect ourselves from the risk. A diet has to take your total cholesterol down to lower than 150 in order to be heart attack free. Doctors are still being told that 200 is fine, so people are still exercising and eating what they are told is a moderate, healthy diet and dropping dead from heart attacks. If you want to live healthier for longer and avoid a lot of diseases typical of aging, the answer is the low fat vegan diet.
You may claim it is a low risk of dying from Cancer or other diseases, but people need to give their bodies the greatest chance to fight off the disease, and that is by absorbing as many nutrients as possible through whole foods, and having clear arteries to constantly bring nutrients to all parts of the body. Vitamins are concentrated and are not recommended, because so many protective nutrients are separated out in order to isolate that one ingredient, and they have been shown to be either ineffective or harmful in many cases.
The studies that have been done comparing meat based diets to a plant based diet are by using a 35% fat plant based diet for a comparison. They do that because it is the only way the meat-based diet will be able to compete. You never see a truly low fat vegan diet up against the meat-based diet. The recent meta-analysis of cholesterol showing it is harmless was immediately criticized and flawed, but that is out in the public encouraging people to eat fatty foods (cholesterol-laden foods are also high in saturated fat and other fats in nearly every case, so it’s a really dumb move for people to think they can eat whatever they want and stay healthy).
I’m 59 and the same weight as in high school, and I eat a lot and a lot of delicious food and don’t have to exercise hard at all. I am not on any medications. My parents at this stage of life were both overweight, and my mother had her gall bladder removed, veins from her legs removed, bad knees and arthritis. My dad had mini-strokes. My blood pressure and total cholesterol are both low. I understand you can criticize this and say it is a personal testimony, without proof of causation, but I think it shows evidence, since I have no other reason to be so slim and healthy. My brother, two years older, has had a little paunch for years and has had a tumor. Since diet directly affects weight, I think I have a point.
I understand your point about not panicking about the findings because most likely you (all readers) won’t be one of the 34,000 who dies from processed meat, and I understand that people should read these studies carefully, and that is what I do.
I don’t think you are accurately describing the studies, the science, or the reality of nutritional requirements for people. But anyone can investigate that if it concerns them.
Update: A much better article has appeared at NeurologicaBlog. It adds this:
They are explaining why WHO decided red meat’s connection to cancer was uncertain (category 2) and processed meat’s connection was certain (category 1): there were too many confounding factors in the red meat studies; by contrast, WHO found the processed meat studies were sufficient to rule out or account for those confounding factors. They also note, as I do, that meat has health benefits that also have to be considered. And they do the math to calculate the actual risk increase of colorectal cancer from eating moderate amounts of processed meats: an 18% increased risk entails moving your actual risk of the cancer from 6% to 7&. As I noted, a relatively trivial bump.
And one study “showed that all cause mortality was significantly increase[d] for those in the highest category of eating processed meat, but not unprocessed red meat.” I noted this before, that the actual effect on life expectancy of vegetarianism is zero in most studies, and only one or two years even in the most skewed of studies. Unless you eat egregious amounts of processed meat. Moderate consumption of processed meat has no significant effect. Nor any consumption of non-processed meat.
How impressing that you know for sure that pigs are “incapable of cognitively valuing things, like life, theirs or anyone else’s.” I mean, scientists are still working hard to get a grip of our own brain, the only brain we can study from inside. And here are you with a perfect understanding of a brain from another species. And it doesn’t stop there. You have a perfect understanding of all other animal brains as well. Elephant brains. Dog brains. Rat brains. Bonobo brains. All the brains of thousand upon thousand of other species on earth. You know them all. That’s really something.
We do indeed know all that. Science has documented the brain anatomy and behaviors of vast swaths of animals and knows the analogs. Impressive, isn’t it? We know enough about the brain to know what’s required for that higher level cognitive processing. We also know the exhibited behaviors it entails. Pigs fail both tests, of anatomy and behavior. So do all the animals we eat. Pigs don’t even pass self-recognition tasks (nor do the other animals you list, except one, which we don’t eat). Much less do they have the physical brain components. Unlike cetaceans, apes, elephants, and even magpies. Which indeed I’d be against eating.
But what if we are missing something important? Some people even believe we will be able to communicate with animals:
https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/futurist-says-well-be-talking-animals-2050-will-we-then-turn-vegetarian-38958
We can only arrive at conclusions from knowledge. Not fantasies contrary to all existing empirical evidence.
Something from article:
“Meat is murder
But let’s imagine for a moment that the technology could do something more – it could reveal more of the animal’s mind to us. One way this could benefit animals is it would show us that animals think about their future. This might stop us from eating animals because it would force us to see animals as beings who value their own lives.
The whole notion of “humane” killing is based on the idea that as long as you take efforts to minimise an animal’s suffering, it is okay to take its life. Since animals do not consider their lives in the future – they are stuck in the “here and now” – they do not value their future happiness.
If technology could allow animals to show us that animals do have future aspirations (imagine hearing your dog say: “I want to play ball”), and that they value their lives (“Don’t kill me!”), it is possible that this technology could stir in us deeper compassion for animals killed for meat.
However, there are also reasons to be sceptical. First, it is possible that people would simply attribute the speaking ability to the technology and not to the animal. Therefore, it would not really change our fundamental view of the animal’s intelligence.
Second, people are oftentimes motivated to ignore animal intelligence information anyway.”
How do we know for certain animals we eat doesn’t value life? It’s impossible to know… If you ask me.
Far from impossible to know, it’s already a confirmed scientific fact. Read the actual article you are commenting on. And if you want more on the science that has established what abilities animals cognitively lack see my debate with Paul Bali.
What exactly is required for higher level cognitive processing? Actually, how do you define cognitive processing?
Obviously, there is a difference between a human, a pig and a carrot.
How do you know that pigs don’t feel joy? My cats surely seem to feel joy.
On the other hand, my 6 months old nephew is basically spending his time eating and sleeping – oh and crying.
Why is it Ok to eat pigs but not cats or babies (a newly born human is pathetic compared to a calf)?
If intelligence is what matters, does it mean we can just kill a child with Down syndrome?
I said pigs do feel joy (my exact words: “They can feel joy. And they can suffer.”). Do try to read what I write more carefully. Feelings are not self-cognition.
Babies develop into people. Pigs don’t. Again, read my words carefully: “They don’t even know what life is. Nor will they come to.”
Babies also have cognitive abilities pigs don’t (their learning capabilities, and cognition skills like facial recognition, are off the charts compared to most other animals).
Hence that’s a false analogy.
Get away from this bad logic. And please pay closer attention to what I said.
As for why we don’t eat cats, that’s assigned value, not inherent value. Again, read my words more carefully: “Pig lives don’t have any inherent value (as distinct from assigned value).” We simply don’t want to eat cats, because we have demarcated them because they are pets (so eating cats poses dangers to people’s pets, which they value, thus we keep them separate; that is an arbitrary utilitarian social choice of our culture).
Finally, if you think Down syndrome makes you equal to a pig in cognitive ability, you have some serious reading up to do.
But if we want to use a correct analogy, it certainly would be ethical to euthanasize babies that, like pigs, lack the hominid cerebral cortex. Adults, too, incidentally. When brain damage is that extensive, the person no longer exists, nor will redevelop. Keeping them alive is pointless; and cruel (in the same way torturing pigs is cruel).
And as to why we don’t eat people for pleasure, human bodies are poisonous to us, but besides that, we have the same demarcation requirement as with pets: we don’t want to create a demand for murder; that’s why we ban the selling of vital organs—and incidentally, organ transplantation, is eating people (just not for pleasure).
The universe doesn’t need to know itself.
It did just fine for 13.8 billion years.
Who cares what the universe needs? We are talking about what valuers value. The universe is not a valuer. Nor are pigs. But we are. That’s why we have inherent value: we are cognitively aware of ourselves and our lives, and value them.
Don’t be facetious. You know perfectly well this was just a metonymy for a larger set of analogs. It stands in for all the things people live for and look forward to the future for. This ability is lacking in pigs. That’s the point. Please stop ignoring the actual point.
Don’t be facetious. You know perfectly well I wasn’t talking about biology. I was talking about living: being alive and aware of being alive and knowing what that means and allows.
You must suck at logic then. A major reason capital punishment is bad is the high rate of innocent people convicted. Note that this negates your argument. So I can only assume you are being an ass and not taking this discussion seriously.
It’s all the worse that your argument requires that prison cause needless suffering, and that our making it do so would justify killing people to end the misery we actively caused them. That’s wildly illogical. Prisons should not be so miserable that death would be preferable to them. Full stop.
You are correctly describing your arguments. Not mine. Every fact I have stated is true, and every inference I have drawn from them is formally valid. Your failure to locate any error of fact or logic corroborates that.
It doesn’t matter where I started. That’s a genetic fallacy. I evaluated the evidence and came to a logically correct conclusion from actual facts. You are the one who does not seem to reason that way.
And no, dolphins are not “close” to pigs, in neither exhibited cognitive behaviors nor analogous brain anatomy. Stop making false claims and ignoring the relevant facts.
And since no facts corroborate that conclusion, we reject it.
This case, the facts do corroborate the conclusion: pigs do not exhibit the cognitive behaviors that make them cognitive valuers, and they do not possess the brain structures necessary to be able to. Those are facts. These are not facts about black people. They are facts about pigs. Stop using the fallacy of false equivalence.
And stop trying to use illogical appeals to emotion like this. This makes you look like you are irrational.
Yes. I am. The science is now that good. The observed ethological science of animals is superbly developed now, unlike in the 19th century. The neuroanatomical science of animals is superbly developed now, unlike in the 19th century. So these are as unlikely to be overturned as heliocentrism or relativity. Indeed, this is as unlikely as the future discovery that carrots are conscious valuers. Yet you seem very certain that won’t happen. So you are hypocritically not living the same stupid skepticism you would ask me to.
Nobody knows what’s going on in a pigs mind. But we know for sure they have a brain, just like we do. With a prefrontal cortex, just as we have. So how probable is it, from an evolutionary perspective, that pigs don’t have a clue about who they are, when even a magpie (an evolved reptile) can prove self-recognition? Bear in mind: the period of advanced animal studies is very short. Not so long ago people thought animals couldn’t feel pain. Later: okay feel pain but not use tools. Later: okay use tools but not make plans for the future. Every time they were proven wrong, and the arguments for using them as food or whatever had to be revisited. With this historical record, why is it reasonable to believe that now suddenly, we know everything there is to know about animal cognition?
That’s not true. We know what goes on in a pig’s mind as well as we know what goes on in our neighbor’s mind. Which means, we know it well enough to know what cognitive skills they have or don’t.
Whereas you don’t “know” what’s going on in anyone’s mind in the sense you must be thinking. This is called the Problem of Other Minds. So how do you know the humans you interact with aren’t mindless robots? Because of observation of cognitive behaviors (if you have certain cognitive skills, you will exhibit them; if you don’t, you won’t; therefore if you never exhibit them, when healthy and normal and awake, you don’t have them; all medicine and education and competence tests are based on understanding this basic principle) and because of comparative anatomy (we know what kinds of brain structures are needed for various functions, and we can directly observe whether comparable structures are in a brain or not).
We have observed pigs extensively. They do not exhibit the cognitive behaviors we are talking about. And we have studied the anatomy of their brains extensively. They do not have the brain structures required for the cognitive abilities we are talking about.
Please stop acting like we don’t know these things. This is science denialism. Things are what they are. You might not like the facts. But they are the facts.
What are you, a creationist?
First. We are evolved fish. That tells us nothing about how we differ from fish. Likewise birds to reptiles. That’s a stupid argument.
Second. Every evolved structure is improbable. That’s why it takes so long to develop them. And why they develop is a function of random historical contingencies. It’s no more unlikely that magpies should develop superior cognitive skills than that apes would. And no more unusual that pigs wouldn’t than that pigeons didn’t. Trying to argue from “that’s improbable” is as stupid an argument as any that creationists use to argue that these animals must be intelligently designed. They aren’t. They are “designed” by random historical contingencies. That’s why they are all so different.
Third. Magpies pass both tests: they have exhibited the ” target=”_blank”>behaviors that signal higher cognition (not equal to human, but above almost all other animals) and their brain anatomy is equally developed (their brains’ relative mass is correspondingly greater and they have brain structures not present in animals like pigs, and though again not equal to humans, but sufficiently analogous and somewhere in between). It does not matter that this is a weird outcome of the random walk of evolution. Everything is a weird outcome of the random walk of evolution. Pigs didn’t randomly tumble down that path. Magpies did. Accept it.
Fourth. We can plausibly hypothesize why this divergence occurred. Pigs didn’t need higher cognition to maintain stable populations. Most animals don’t. That’s why they last thousands of years yet never develop this intelligence. Pigs especially now don’t need it since we help them maintain stable populations (so they need intelligence now even less; because they are relying on ours, e.g. food supply, medical care, defending babies from predators). Magpies, however, evidently fell into a competitive niche that required them to out-think competing bird or other species or go extinct. Going extinct is usually what happens in that scenario, precisely because evolving a pathway to higher cognition is so improbable. But with billions of species rolling these same dice, some few will roll well. And the magpie is one of those that randomly got lucky (other birds have also gone further down that pathway than most mammals in fact).
Again, you might not like these facts. But facts they are.
This is only partially true: in mammals the cerebral cortex seems to be responsible for the higher-level cognitive functions. Birds’ cortex is unimpressive, though. So, by comparing anatomy you’d conclude that birds can’t be as smart as mammal. But of course, corvid as very smart. Only very recently it was determined that a different brain area is responsible for bird intelligence (nidopallium caudolaterale).
We have observed pigs extensively. They do not exhibit the cognitive behaviors we are talking about. And we have studied the anatomy of their brains extensively. They do not have the brain structures required for the cognitive abilities we are talking about.
I’m not an expert – but http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/unusual-animal-intelligence lists pigs along dolphins, crows, and elephants (my emphasis):
Follow my links. Your science is out of date. The assumption that bird brains (in particular corvids) are “unimpressive” was a 19th century assumption long since refuted. Bird brains have “comparable” (my word) structures to our cerebral cortex. They evolved the same functions by a different anatomical strategy. Since humans give birth through the gap in a woman’s hips, brain size had to be economized while still increasing neural connective quantity. The solution was the “folded” structure we call the cerebral cortex. Birds are born from eggs. Consequently, there is no such limitation on the size of their heads (weight instead is a factor, for flight, which was solved with lighter bones). So bird brains did not have to develop that folded structure to increase neural connective quantity. But they increased it all the same. Immensely, in fact, in the corvids. Pigs come nowhere near their neural connective quantity relative to body mass.
Your link contains no evidence of the higher cognitive functions we are talking about (e.g. it concedes pigs fail the mirror test of self-recognition). You are conflating different measures of intelligence. Your computer is highly intelligent. It does not possess self-cognition. We are not interested in intelligence. We are interested in the cognitive functions necessary to identify oneself and cognitively value it. Please stop using fallacies like this. Pay attention to the actual argument and address it with relevant evidence.
I accept that cognitive ability is important to understand the harm in killing animals.
However, it’s not clear why you seem to set the bar at self-conciesnece (a term which is still poorly understood), except as a way to separate humans from the animals (theists would approve). Yes, even self-consciousness isn’t necessarily restricted to humans. You seem to suggest as such for magpies but for some reason you rubbish pigs, which is weird, as pigs are actually near the top of the animal IQ scale:
At any rate, why being conscious is not enough to get respect? As Peter Singer [1] states, the evidence is extremely strong that mammals and birds are conscious. They feel pain and have complex emotions (including fear). Why is that not enough?
You seem to agree that animal suffering exists and should be avoided. However, in the previous thread on this topic (which you linked to), you seem to suggest modern farms treat animals well because this makes sense economically. This just doesn’t make sense: to maximize ROI, you’d want to pack as many animals as possible and grow them as fast as possible. As Peter Singer states, chickens grow so fast that their bones sometimes break under their own weight. These chicks will die of thirst.
Then there’s the ecological angel which you seem to dismiss. However, the science says otherwise (again summarized by Peter Singer):
(1) 70% of US grain is fed to animals
(2) Water pollution (this is a classic example of externalities – the farms don’t pay the price for the increased pollution – that’s someone else’s problem
(3) Livestock responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions – more than transportation (FAO, 2006)
(4) Global warming could be primarily the result of CFCs (which we stopped using) and methane (Hansen, 2000)
(5) IPCC: meat is adds to global warming, eat less meat (IPCC chair, Rajendra Pachuri, 2008)
[1] Peter Singer: The Ethics of What We Eat
First:
It’s not clear why self-conscousness is what makes life inherently valuable? I have explained this repeatedly: you have to be able to cognitively recognize life to value it, and you have to value it for your life to be inherently valuable. Otherwise, you have no comprehension of even what more life means, much less are able to value it. With no reason to value it, it has no value. Full stop. It can have assigned value (you, yourself, can choose to value an animal’s life, and thus keep it as a pet for example, but this cannot be because the animal’s life has intrinsic value; yours does; its doesn’t). Please pay attention to what I am saying. I should not have to repeat myself like this.
Second:
Please don’t conflate “intelligence” with self-cognition. That is a fallacy, which again ignores everything I am saying. Address what I am saying. No straw man fallacies. See my discussion of the fallacious argument from pig intelligence in my reply to Dalton.
Third:
I have said nothing about not respecting animals. I have said we should care about their suffering. But death is not suffering. And I have said we can assign value to animals if we want to (hence, pets). But that is an arbitrary decision, it is not demanded by any property their life possesses that requires sustaining it until it dies miserably from disease, predation, accident, or old age. It is not morally necessary to make animals our pets. That’s just an aesthetic personal preference.
Singer is, like many in the academy, a lousy philosopher. He conflates the moral demands of suffering with the moral demands of life extension. They are not the same, or even comparable, concerns. He is also a lousy philosopher if he thinks life has magical intrinsic value. It does not. Life has no value that is not assigned by a valuer. Because values do not exist in the absence of a valuer. Which is why only valuers can have lives of inherent value: only they can value their own lives, thus granting those lives value independent of anyone else’s needs. Only such a valuer can appreciate what death entails the loss of, and thus only such persons lose something by dying. Animals that can’t recognize this, lose nothing by dying. Because they do not value their future life. Because they have no comprehension of a future life or its potentials. Life means nothing to them. And never will. Consequently, death means nothing to them.
Fourth:
The farming techniques you suggest actually foster disease and the violent or oppressive loss of stock. As evidenced by the difference in these measures between third world industrial farms and first world industrial farms. For example, when chickens are breaking bones from growth rate, that entails an increased stock loss; there is no way that’s sound business practice, from the perspective of efficiency. Although indeed, business people are often idiots, as I also noted. They will burn their own business to the ground even, if it will generate a short term profit. Hence we need laws to compel them to not act like idiots. And in addition protect animals from needless harm. Hence, as I have also said, even if it were capitalistically wise to abuse animals, it would still be morally necessary of us to outlaw it. And so we should be. And indeed we have progress yet to be made on this. Some states and nations are making that progress faster than others. And I approve all efforts to shame the slackers for not doing the same.
Fifth:
Most grain fed to animals is waste product. The rest is converted into hundreds of products besides food. Stop buying alarmist distortions of the facts that support your agenda. Learn what really happens, and how it actually compares to other industries. I discuss these points in detail in the post I directed you to.
Water pollution is an even greater problem for agriculture. The solution is not banning agriculture. Ditto husbandry. Please think better than this. Please.
I also refute in the above link the greenhouse gas claim. You are using pseudoscientific reasoning by ignoring the offset: first, that figure is not for first world husbandry (“no one burned down a forest to feed you Iowa beef”); second, if we stop making animals, we will make something else. The greenhouse gas cost of animals is the difference between those two values (when you do the correct math, “you end up with just 6% of manmade emissions coming from actual animal farming that would go away if we stopped…[and] from actual modernized industrial animal farming [vs. inefficient third world farming, it’s l]ess than 2%”). If you are really worried about the emissions cost of food, stop eating tomatoes out of season. One serving of winter tomatoes is a dozen times costlier in emissions than an entire hamburger. Oh, and stop showering. Costs the same as a hamburger.
Don’t buy lies and distortions in aid of a cause. Check the facts. Make sure they hold up. In this case, they just don’t.
This summer the neuroscientist Lori Marino (who published the first definitive evidence for mirror self-recognition in dolphins) published a paper in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology on pigs (together with Prof. Christina M. Colvin). The paper is a summary on where science stands today on pigs mental capacities. Their overall conclusion: “…what is known suggests that pigs are cognitively complex and share many traits with animals whom we consider intelligent.” The study describes symbolic language comprehension (p 5), machiavellian intelligence (p 9), self-agency (p 12), emotional contagion (p 13), personality (p 15), among other things. Their conclusion on personality: “All of these studies point to the presence of stable individual behavioral traits that reveal a complex personality in pigs that overlaps with that of other animals, including humans.” And their final conclusion: “In this paper we have identified a number of findings from studies of pig cognition, emotion, and behavior which suggest that pigs possess complex ethological traits (…)” (p 15).
In an interview Dr. Marino makes this comment about the findings on machiavellian intelligence: “This kind of cognitive deception is something we’ve really only seen in great apes” … “It relies on visual perspective taking and then modeling how the other animal is going to behave. And pigs do it, too.” She also says: “Overall, this paper shows that pigs share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species” … “There is now good scientific evidence to suggest we need to rethink our overall relationship to them.”
The study:
The interview:
That study actually adduced no evidence for self-cognition. Try reading it. Not its summary. The paper. Deception is common in the animal world (though for pigs all they show is attention to and learning from circumstantial cues and outcomes, something even computers can be programmed to do now). It does not indicate self-awareness. Many animals can also Clever Hans linguistic and gesture commands. That tells us nothing about their comprehension (Clever Hans, after all, was not actually clever). And emotion and personality (and emotion triggers) are not the awareness of self either. Being aware of one’s emotions and personality is a wholly different thing than having them.
Don’t be fooled by clever wording. Countless animals “overlap” humans in cognitive domains (e.g. emotion, problem solving). That has nothing to do with the point of overlap that is relevant to this discussion. You can’t fabricate self-awareness out of showing animals can be trained (by human effort and natural events), have feelings and emotional triggers and population-varied behavioral styles. This has nothing to do with self-awareness, a capacity for conscious value assignment, or higher cognition at all.