Ask HN: How do you seek information? not joking

[freeduck]

Searched google,duckduck, frontpage

For:

are people naturally meat eaters teeth.

And

are people naturally meat eaters teeth science articles.

Got the same results from all engines. All pop articles.

PETA consistently comes out on top.

I'm dot trying to start a conversation about PETA. But about search engines and information gathering.

I know I sometimes troll myself but this is a legit question. I am honestly frustrated.

Please help

[pelagicAustral]

Whats the question? Sorry I'm not entirely sure.

Searching for things is difficult but you need to keep in mind that your are doing it wrong, every time... You are missing something, you are searching for too much, you are phrasing the wrong way, etc.

In my case, if I was looking for 'do people have carnivore teeth'

(1) I would search Google first. Use advanced search: inurl, intitle, site

(2) Search Google Scholar.

(3) Search Sci-Hub

(4) Change my search: '[v] carnivore teeth' (v = 'human, person, homo sapiens') - for each v repeat 1, 2, 3

(5) Track the useful leads.

And basically loop until you get what you want...

Depending on the scope and context of the search you might want to add Shodan or other specialized search engines.

I would recommend usign Maltego for keeping data together, perhaps Zotero as-well|instead

[freeduck]

Where does Sci-Hub live these days?

[endisneigh]

I ask people on the internet.

What I'd love is a search engine where queries are actually answered by people. Not something like Stackoverflow, but rather questions that are structured such that there's a single canonical answer that is either a link or less than some arbitrary number of characters.

Rather than up or downvoting things, these queries, questions and answers respectively are made available and by selecting an existing query mapping to a question and answer strengthens the relationship.

Since involving actual people all of the time would be slow, the incentive would be that your questions are prioritized if you answered questions yourself.

Obviously easier said than done, but I think it's the future of search.

[PaulHoule]

Stackoverflow is a dumpster fire.

Generally systems where people volunteer answers have the same problem as the wider web. People who don't know what they are talking about but who sound convincing get their answers voted up.

[freeduck]

Thanks for the tip.

Let's see.

https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/104816/is-meat-a...

[freeduck]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnivore

wikipedia was also previously often referenced when doing a google search.

Does anybody know of a good search engine which indexes wiki pages?

[freeduck]

Maybe because I search from my phone

[freeduck]

https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/96411/67790

[freeduck]

Stackoverflow has help me many times

With real useful answers. As late as today.

[endisneigh]

yup - that's why I'd advocate for not using a voting system.

[freeduck]

The voting system might not be perfect. And no top answer is not always the good one. But the good answer is most often there.

[freeduck]

Where?

[endisneigh]

It depends on the topic. Sometimes reddit, sometimes on here, etc.

[f0e4c2f7]

I think a lot about exactly the question I want to ask.

Remember the computer from hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy? They ask what's the answer to life the universe and everything.

People fixate on the answer but there is another take away. You could phrase your question to the computer differently. Or in your case the search engine.

Some of this depends on asking yourself what you actually want to know. Some of it depends on using language that accurately fits the question.

The question is also likely not the search term. The search term is usually an incomplete answer to the question you want to ask with the key part left out.

Of course then you have to vet sources, use other search engine tricks, and so on. But that's usually how I start.

So with your question I can only guess but I think a good search term might be "did early homosapiens eat meat?"

When I Google that I get this as the first result:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-f...

[megameter]

The most important part is to do some distillation under the principle "data is not information". When you collect a bunch of sources you have data. When you filter according to a benchmark of your choosing and bind the useful bits into notes, you have extracted information.

Getting information is hard work, and acknowledging this stops me from pursuing it much of the time. A lot of articles that proport to discuss a topic directly are not informative and try to cover up that fact. So instead you have to figure out side channels. E.g. for gleaning understanding of human meat-eating I would look for discussions of carnivores in the general sense, extract that into a set of "meat eater traits" and then search for the traits in humans one by one.

[runjake]

I get far better results searching for “evolution of human teeth”.

You’re searching with terms that are popular PETA talking point wordings (“naturally meat eaters teeth”).

[neonnoodle]

The first thing I'd do is determine which field(s) would have insight into the answer.

It's a question about human anatomy/physiology, diet, and evolution (adaptation). So, biology and specifically biological anthropology would be good fields to start with. If you use an academic search engine like Google Scholar, look for papers or textbooks in the field of biological anthropology (also called physical anthropology), human evolutionary biology, and primate biology.

Even though the question is easy to express in plain English, often scientific topics are discussed in technical vocabulary. In biology and anthropology, "dentition" is used as a technical term for the configuration of teeth in the evolutionary context. Also, you'll probably want to expand your search to include human ancestors (hominids/hominins).

Ultimately, rephrasing your search with some more technical language will me more likely to return science-based results. The keywords /hominid diet evolution dentition/ will get you more valuable info.

TO ANSWER THE QUESTION ITSELF:

In great apes (our clade), tooth shape is not reliably predictive of diet. Chimpanzees have large canines but are mostly frugivorous, yet they also hunt and eat meat. Gorillas have huge canines but eat mostly leaves.

The biggest change in human dental morphology over our evolutionary history is the decreased robusticity of our jaws and jaw muscles. Our jaws have become a lot smaller than those of our ancestors, and our teeth have become smaller as well. However, this change coincided with the development of hunting, food processing, and cooking, which profoundly improved the nutritional quality of hominid diets. A wolf or lion needs large canines and carnassial teeth to kill prey and eat raw meat off the bone. Humans have technology to assist with this, and thus there has been reduced selection pressure on our teeth to accomplish these tasks. Our jaw shape reconfiguration may also be an important structural precondition of frontal brain growth, and the paleontological record shows an inverse correlation between jaw size and cranial size over time.

Hominids hunted and ate meat. There is substantial paleontological evidence that meat has been a part of human diets for as long as our genus has existed. Our small teeth are fine for the job because we have knives to cut with and fire to cook with.

All of this, as I'm sure you know, is completely irrelevant to the moral question of meat eating today. But it is a wrongheaded argument by vegetarians to suggest that our physiology is not up to the task. Every single indigenous culture eats meat.

[freeduck]

Thank you for your answer. Found a similar explanation in[1].

But my question is not really about: should humans eating meat? I know we eat meat(in general). I know it made us who we are, and we are all gonna die.

My question is rather. It is a question people ask, and the answer from our modernday oracles is honestly bullshit.

So who to ask? Yes Google Scholar used to pop up. It does not any more. I/we have to know.

And honestly again I no longer really trust any of Googles/abc's products.

So let me try to rephrase.

Where would normal people like my self seek information, without knowing the correct lingo in advance?

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16990

[freeduck]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03091...

Actually looked pretty OK the few seconds I had to scan it before it crashed. I assume because of my privacy/Internet not spammed by ad's plugins.

[freeduck]

Linked to by

Google Scholar

[ColinHayhurst]

for a different take: https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=are+people+naturally+meat+ea...

[antman]

Easy, google:

are people naturally meat eaters ISSN

[etiam]

Did you mean

are people naturally meat eaters +"ISSN"

?

:P

Honestly I don't know whether Google has that issue, because I haven't used them for years, but just about everything I do use seems to take an approach bordering on outright hostile towards paying any heed to many crucially distinguishing terms.

I think the suggestion is great though.

[JesusRobotics]

I think this is a great question. I’m looking forward to any useful replies.

[PaulHoule]

The answer is obvious.

Naturally people eat what is front of them. If meat is available they will eat it, if meat is not available they can live without it.

That's got nothing to do with the question of "should humans eat meat from industrial farms".

[muzani]

Why aren't we eating grass? There's a lot more grass than meat in front of us.

[PaulHoule]

You have to carry around a huge and failure prone digestive system if you want to eat grass.

Horses and cows have deadly problems with their digestive systems much more often than we do.

[armchairhacker]

The problem with that questions is that it’s really controversial and “natural” doesn’t really mean anything. There are all kinds of nutrition studies It’s like asking “is Joe Biden a good president?”

The best you can do is read articles saying why meat is good and look at articles saying why meat is bad. Usually everything from one article which isn’t directly contradicted by the other article is fact, and vice versa.

[freeduck]

Well I mean "natural" as in the nature that created us.

https://www.healthline.com/health/womens-health/childbearing...

And then some science to back it up.

[freeduck]

Is this article trustworthy?

[rsj_hn]

That humans are naturally omnivores, eating both meat and plants, is not controversial in the slightest.

[freeduck]

It is in politics. Thats kind of not this forum. Yet it sort of is

[rsj_hn]

I understand that vegetarians have a moral code that says not to eat meat, which is fine. I'm not saying that's bad or they should change what they believe. But as a historical question of human diet, there is no controversy.

We have cave paintings all over the world of men chasing large animals. That wasn't a game of tag, they are going to eat them. We know the development of cattle culture, fishing societies, etc, all over the world. Even in India, the one traditional society in which a sizable minority (%25) doesn't eat meat, there is widespread evidence of meat-eating prior to the introduction of vegetarianism by the Jains in ~500 BC. But ancient Hindu civilization is much older than that, and prior to this ate meat (and sacrificed animals). All other ancient civilizations: Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Central American societies -- all ate meat, just as their predecessors, the hunter gatherers ate meat.

It is of course not the only thing people ate -- meat in the ancient world was much harder to come by than today and diets varied greatly. But we humans are omnivores, and if people think this is controversial, then they are refusing to face facts about our history.

[freeduck]

Bing same thing

[max_hammer]

reddit.com/r/askscience

[freeduck]

No dice

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/q3ffy6/are_peop...

[osipov]

if you don't want pop science articles did you try scholar.google.com instead?