Several years ago I became a vegan, for ethical reasons; a personal choice—part of my tiny contribution to natural selection and religious belief—which only becomes a public issue when social eating occurs. Meat eaters make more of an issue of my diet than I do. Those who do usually fall back on generalisations; we need to eat meat, poultry, fish and dairy because we’ve evolved to or because we’ve been given biblical warrant to. These generalisations are mindless; neither contributes to the argument for evolution or intelligent design, or to the more challenging argument that they might be the same…