Imagine you went to a restaurant to try out some free food samples. The owners decide to blindfold you and clog your nose so the only sense that would be in effect would be your taste; your sight and smell would not have any psychological affect on the taste of food. So with that in mind, if the owners fed you feces (poop), would you know it was poop? Or would you think it was just some terrible chilli or something?

The reason I ask is because a friend and I were asking if humans, and other mammals, had an inherent knowledge of the taste of feces. He says we do and if a person ate some crap, they would know. I say we don't and the only reason we don't eat crap is because we can see that it's crap and it smells bad. And even if we did force ourselves to eat a serving of poop, we would only know it was poop because of our smell. We don't have an inherent knowledge of what poop taste like imo.

What do you think? Without your ability to see or smell, would you know if you ate some crap.

It is widely known that using only the tongue, you can guess only four different tastes. It is by using the nose that we achieve limitless tastes. You can, however, use your brain as a placebo effect.

You could guess that you're eating something weird. However, you would not know what it is.

spurge? Is that you?

I've often pondered this myself. I personally believe we have a natural ability to taste poop, or at least to know it's bad,. Perhaps our early ancestors didn't have this ability and ate their poop, not knowing it was bad for them (similar to dogs). But due to random mutations, some of us began to develop a distaste for it. The ones with a distaste for poop were less likely to eat poop and were thus more healthy. As a result their genes were passed on more successfully and the distaste for poop became dominant. This eventually led to us finding the smell of poop to be bad as well.

Can't say spurge without purge.

Didn't know tastes were part of genes. Mutations born from the evolution of species does not make you distate something. That's like saying that for some mutation we don't eat random mushrooms because they can be hazardous.

It's not bad for animals to eat poop, though. Dogs may do it because they're lacking in digestive enzymes, and rabbits produce a special kind of stool that they actually have to eat or else they'll get sick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylthiocarbamide#Genetics

Define "too bloody".