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I'm not a biology person at all so please forgive me if my question is silly. I was just wondering that why didn't evolution cause us to digest, without issues decomposed food?

aaaaa says reinstate Monica
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Kashmiri
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  • What evolutionary advantage would that give us? "Rotten" by definition means that some or all of the usable nutrients have decomposed, so what is the point? – MattDMo Aug 18 '20 at 16:22
  • Well imo animals eat half decomposed things. – Kashmiri Aug 18 '20 at 16:26
  • I understand that is what spices were originally used for ; to mask bad flavors in food that is "turning" ( bad). – blacksmith37 Aug 18 '20 at 16:27
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    There's really no "why" answer here, any more than you can say "why" cows eat grass, or blue whales eat krill. Evolution doesn't have a purpose or goal. The only answer is "because our ancestors survived without eating rotten food". – jamesqf Aug 18 '20 at 16:31
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4519257/ it doesnt give us a significant survival advantage... food rots very fast in some climates, but while fruit and leaves are alive, the are very abundant. – bandybabboon Aug 18 '20 at 16:38
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    You could argue that we have the ability to eat certain "rotten" foods, those that have fermented. – Bryan Krause Aug 18 '20 at 16:48
  • Yes, there are animals called carrion eaters that will preferentially consume rotting food, because they have either enzymes or commensal microbiota that aid in digesting it and obtaining energy/nutrients from it. However, we and most other animals don't have that ability because of biochemical trade-offs. – MattDMo Aug 18 '20 at 16:55
  • @Bryan Krause: Then there's cheese. Or various sauces made from rotten fish, from Roman garum & liquamen to southeast Asian things like the Vietnamese nuoc mam. – jamesqf Aug 19 '20 at 04:56
  • @jamesqf I believe those are also fermented (besides cheese). – Bryan Krause Aug 19 '20 at 14:55

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Food is considered "rotten" when it has a large population of micororganisms like bacteria and fungus eating it. Some of these microorganisms have evolved to produce toxins that harm animals that would otherwise eat the food. Animals could evolve to tolerate these toxins, and some have. However, bacteria have a large advantage over animals in an evolutionary arms race due to their short generation time and large population number. So competing with bacteria over carrion is a specialized niche, avoiding it has been selected for in most animal lineages.

timeskull
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