Why do we eat food at all? It seems self-evident that a biology that didn't synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide would be outcompeted by those that did.

>It seems self-evident that a biology that didn't synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide would be outcompeted by those that did.

Their shortsightedness poisoned the Earth with the waste products of their energy production, changing the world's climate, and driving many of them to extinction. It also skewed the efficiency numbers towards organisms that didn't need to sit around synthesizing carbohydrates when there was so many free carbohydrates just sitting around for anything able to digest them.

It's more efficient to let others do the work and simply steal, which is what we are doing, up to the highest level.

I'm no biologist, heck I didn't even study science in college, but wouldn't entropy suggest that adding another layer would be less efficient?

"I'm surprised many believe this. It seems self-evident that our bodies are well adapted to periods of starvation. Any biology that wasn't so adapted would have been out-competed by those did."

I actually never thought about it from that angle. It seems like it should obviously be true now. Now the question is how true and if nuances exist where our bodies can take it but not optimal in health.

Yea, that's the key imo. Just because our bodies were able to deal with it does not mean it is optimal.

I think our current understanding of medicine and human biology is quite limited, so there may be tons of these little quirks - non obvious things that are actually amazing for us. But, i'm sure there will also be tons of things that are not directly related to what we did to survive thousands of years ago.