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Alicorn comments on Dealing with the high quantity of scientific error in medicine - Less Wrong
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I don't think that is correct. Much autotroph biomass is indigestible (think tree trunks) and some of the rest is deliberately poisonous. A clever plant doesn't want to be eaten. Furthermore, we ought to eat stuff that has good ingredients - we don't really care whether it makes them itself, or steals them from the manufacturer. And in any case, different living things are built from slightly different kinds of stuff - a lot of autotrophs don't even bother with vitamins A, C, D, and E.
And finally, try to avoid using the terms "evolutionarily old" and "highly evolved". Every living thing you see around you is equally "evolved", since every living thing has the same "evolutionary age" - roughly 3.5 billion years.
Surely number of generations matters, too?
I'm not sure that this is at all meaningful because things like selection pressure and mutation rate also arguably matter. If one has a species with lots of generations but an incredibly low mutation rate it isn't going to adapt to an environment as much as another species in the same environment with a higher mutation rate.
Ok, then. Number of generations. Which makes human among the least evolved of all species on the planet. Well, maybe some tortoises are less evolved than us, and maybe elephants and whales and sequoias too, but we certainly have evolved through fewer generations than rats, jellyfish, mosquitoes, sunflowers, earthworms, amoebae, and E. coli.