How can a full grown cow come from grass?

Ha, and men will eat steak and burgers and become

I rather see a cow.

It doesn't Erik, it's a lifeform fuelled by grass. The cow is not made of grass.
Remember it has to eat all day long to get enough.
How can children grow just on fish fingers, beans & chips? (and I know some that do).

How can a full grown man come from smack??!!

....Witness Pete Doherty.

quote:

Originally posted by Rasher:
It doesn't Erik, it's a lifeform fuelled by grass. The cow is not made of grass.
Remember it has to eat all day long to get enough.
How can children grow just on fish fingers, beans & chips? (and I know some that do).

Yeah but, yeah but..it starts life as a little itty bitty foetus which receives nutrients via its mum (which comes from grass)and it grows, gets born, grows some more and either the bone, hoof, hair etc. seemingly gets created from nothing or it comes from the grass. Where else can it come from accept grass and water. I dont get it.

quote:

Originally posted by Rasher:
It doesn't Erik, it's a lifeform fuelled by grass. The cow is not made of grass.
Remember it has to eat all day long to get enough.
How can children grow just on fish fingers, beans & chips? (and I know some that do).

Aren't you s'posed to be off on holiday with yours, Rasher? Off you go now, and enjoy youself! Have a great one.

James

quote:

Originally posted by erik scothron:


Yeah but, yeah but..it starts life as a little itty bitty foetus which receives nutrients via its mum (which comes from grass)and it grows, gets born, grows some more and either the bone, hoof, hair etc. seemingly gets created from nothing or it comes from the grass. Where else can it come from accept grass and water. I dont get it.

It's all down to this.

Mark

quote:

Where else can it come from accept grass and water.

Not forgetting oxygen. It's good stuff but it kills you in the end.

C

OK so even if I accept that metabolim and oxygen are involved how can grass turn into bone, teeth, hair, hoof, blood and different types of organ?

For this to work then grass must contain all the elements nesessary to convert itself to all the different parts of a cow.

The only thing that ever gets added to the slimy little blob of the calf foetus is grass, water and oxygen which gets metabolised into bone, teeth, hair, hoof, blood and different types of organ? I really dont see how.

quote:

For this to work then grass must contain all the elements nesessary to convert itself to all the different parts of a cow.

Then one must assume that it does.

Isn't that the easy way out?

If I recall my high school science class, the plant-eating animals have the ability to break down the double cell walls of plants and extract nutrients that human beings cannot.

While plants are an important part of the human diet for fiber purposes, we cannot live on them for the reasons above.

Chayro,

What you say is true but does it account for there being sufficient nutrients to form bone, teeth etc. I can't think that it does.

Erik

Well, the fact that the strongest animals on earth - elephants, horses, etc, live entirely on plants is proof that there is ample nutrition in grass, hay, carrots...

Shame we humans can't take full advantage of it. Funny that gorillas and other primates never eat meat, yet humans do. Did we really evolve from baboons? A common ancestor, maybe, but that's about it I think. Otherwise, we'd share a common digestive system.

I think the answer lies in reducing it to its most basic level which is that all life is based around carbon.

Plants are made of carbon as are animals. Of course there are other elements involved as well but carbon is the basic building block.

Think of it perhaps as knocking down a series of brick sheds and using the bricks to build an elaborate mansion.

The building blocks are the same it's just how they are put together that is different.

(In a simplistic way of course)

Mark

quote:

Originally posted by Chayro:


Shame we humans can't take full advantage of it.

Chayro,

We can however digest grass juice! Wheat grass juice is very healthy indeed and contains all kinds of enzymes. I used to drink alot of the stuff once upon a time but it is pricey and not easy to find unless one grows one's own and juices it.

Erik

Wheat grass juice

quote:

Originally posted by Chillkram:
I think the answer lies in reducing it to its most basic level which is that all life is based around carbon.

Plants are made of carbon as are animals. Of course there are other elements involved as well but carbon is the basic building block.

Think of it perhaps as knocking down a series of brick sheds and using the bricks to build an elaborate mansion.

The building blocks are the same it's just how they are put together that is different.

(In a simplistic way of course)

Mark

Mark,

I think you have provided the best answer so far but I would be truly amazed if grass and water alone can be broken down and its consituent building blocks be reformed into so diverse and seemingly totaly different substances. I wish I had paid more attention to my teachers when I was at school (actually I wish I had gone to school more often than I did)

Erik

Erik

You are fooling around. What is the purpose of this question? Explain please.

It is a genuine question. I was taking a walk in the country and sat watching cows eating grass and the question formed itself in my mind and I could not answer it. That's all.

I'm not sure in what direction to eat this.
The question of how a cow can grow from near nothing by just eating seems the heavyweight question.

You have to disassemble food into low level components before allowing it inside the system.
This is a matter of simplifying the environment in order to keep it manageable.
It's much too risky to take in high level components. Anything could happen.
I think no chain longer than 3 or 4 amino acids is absorbed,
so any claim about 'healthy enzymes in food' should have to apply to the digestion process itself since the enzymes are never absorbed.
There are some amino acids that humans don't make themselves and they have to extract them out of food.

So the complexity of what you eat is secondary.

As far as the elements go, I thought if you 'd regard a cow as a bag of chemicals, it wouldn't be cost much to buy them.
Ten times more than a human, but a human would still cost only a few euros, assuming you don't use bottled water.
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, calcium, magnesium, chloride, natrium, potassium, nothing expensive.
They are all present in grass.

The secondary issue is how one animal prefers one diet and another animal another diet. One animal is good at breaking down one thing,
another one is built to break down other foods.
Also, maybe a cow could by on grass alone but there could be deficiencies so the cow might also crave a little clover or a dandelion now and then.

Then there is the sophisticated part called ontogeny, or morphogenesis,
about how one cell multiplies and differentiates to 300 or so celltypes(I assume cows have about the same number of cells as humans),
all working nicely together for a few decades. That's a challenge.

I am led to understand that during foetal development the amazing thing that happens as cell division proceeds is that the information in the chromosomes is used to direct seemingly similar cells to turn into entirely different body parts. This amazing adaptability which grows fingers, a heart, a liver, n leg bone and so on is "forgotten after this first amazing growth.

All this complexity is fuelled by energy conversion. In the case of a cow the energy conversion is from grass.

Medical science is throwing sums of money at trying to find the mechanisms behind this unique "on off" controlled foetal cell diversity. If we could figure it out and replicate it throughout life we could have worm out body parts removed and simply "tell" our life mechanism to grow a new healty replacement. Big bucks spent for a big prize.

Of course this may all be crap but I think most of it is correct.

regards
geoff