The Amazing VNO

So, I am still in the process of reading The Vegetarian Myth though, admittedly, it is taking me quite the effort to push through it. After reading Foer's Eating Animals, which I found to be engaging and a page-turner, The Vegetarian Myth is proving a slow read. I think I just dont like the voice of the author. She went from loud, aggressive, radical vegan to loud, aggressive, radical meat-eater. Something about her tone irks me (which makes it difficult to buy her story).

Which brings me to another point. I have been reading many of these nutrition, animal-rights, factory farming/agriculture, etc books lately and have noticed a certain overlying thread - and not a good one. The incidence of taking scientific one-liners and basing huge chunks of an argument on them is enormous. This is the downfall of a non-scientist writing about scientific things. They have no way to accurately interpret what they are putting down, they are just putting it out there in its raw form (and thus a crowd of readers learn to believe it as well). In the last few months of reading these books I have seen SO many biased uses of scientific figures to prove an author's personal viewpoint, it is truly unbelievable (or not). I wonder if the author, or the reader, or the public in general realizes that we as scientists arent even sure about a lot of these things and are still debating them within the scientific community. I read an 'archaeological fact', presented as such, about the earliest agriculturalists in The Vegetarian Myth last night (something that has been in contentious debate in archaeological circles for many decades) and thought, "Oh great, well, Im glad she settled that. Ill just quit my PhD now and let Peter Rowley-Conwy and Doug Price know she solved the mystery."

One thing that did come up in the book last night, which I hadnt heard much about was the VNO or vomeronasal organ. What an amazing thing with such possibilities. It is basically our 'sixth sense' organ. A list of its uses in animals, from Wikipedia:

• Salamanders perform a nose tapping behavior to supposedly activate their VNO.
• Snakes use this organ to sense prey, sticking their tongue out to gather scents and touching it to the opening of the organ when the tongue is retracted.
• The organ is well developed in strepsirrhine primates such as lemurs and lorises, developed to varying degrees in New World monkeys, and underdeveloped in Old World Monkeys and apes.
• Elephants transfer chemosensory stimuli to the vomeronasal opening in the roof of their mouths using the prehensile structure, sometimes called a "finger", at the tips of their trunks.
  
• Painted Turtles use this organ to use their sense of smell underwater.

Also suggested that this is the organ that makes human females living together sync on the same menstruation cycle. Brilliant!!