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Not to be snarky, but isn’t every part of a successful organism an evolutionary marvel? If not, then perhaps a more interesting tale would be to look at the bo
by haram_masala 5y ago
Not to be snarky, but isn’t every part of a successful organism an evolutionary marvel? If not, then perhaps a more interesting tale would be to look at the bodily systems that are substandard garbage. I’d probably start with the lower back.
- nuclearnice1 5y agoThe back is a good one. How about this design where you stuff food in the same hole you breathe through? Seems so unnecessarily dangerous.
- btgeekboy 5y ago> Seems so unnecessarily dangerous. I agree, but it hasn't killed enough to evolutionarily matter.
- diamond_hands 5y agoIt has for fish!
- smegger001 5y agoIts worse for Squid their brain is a torus shape with its esophagus running through the middle. their brain cannot stretch but their esophagus can making it so that if a squid were to swallow to large of a bite it can rip their brain.
- ekianjo 5y ago> Seems so unnecessarily dangerous. It's not like there's no mitigation in place in the body itself.
- Turing_Machine 5y agoSure, but that's another hack. Evolution's solution: cough it out Better solution: don't send food, water, and air down the same pipe in the first place I mean, no competent engineer would design the plumbing for a building such that the same pipes were used for water and air at different times, right?
- leetcrew 5y agoa software engineer would. we call it "multiplexing".
- ekianjo 5y agoNo its not just cough it out. The mechanism to avoid food and fluids is a lot more complex than that.
- nuclearnice1 5y agoThat reminds a bit of systems where the data plane and control plane are the same. Like the old AT&T phone network.
- agumonkey 5y agopee and reproduction too
- rabidrat 5y agowait until you hear about the cloaca
- lioeters 5y ago> A cloaca is the posterior orifice that serves as the only opening for the digestive, reproductive, and urinary tracts of many vertebrate animals. > All amphibians, reptiles, birds, and a few mammals have this orifice, from which they excrete both urine and feces. > Mating through the cloaca is known as cloacal copulation, commonly referred to as cloacal kiss. > The cloacal region is also often associated with a secretory organ, the cloacal gland, which has been implicated in the scent-marking behavior of some reptiles, marsupials, amphibians, and monotremes.
- tidenly 5y agoI've read that urination actually helps by cleaning out the urethra after ejaculation, though, stopping some diseases - which some people think might be why men have the urge to pee often after sex. So it may not be as evolutionary crazy as one would think
- fma 5y agoSame for women... "In every final scan we could see a big, full bladder, even though most of the women went to the toilet before they went inside the MRI,” explains Pek with comical astonishment. “We think it might be evolution’s way to force women to urinate after sex. Perhaps our ancestors developed this function to avoid urinary tract infections, but that’s only a hypothesis." https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvgkzw/the-story-of-the-dutch-couple-ida-sabelis-pek-van-andel-sex-intercourse-mri-scanner-for-science https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvgkzw/the-story-of-the-dutc...
- AlotOfReading 5y agoYou need mucus and it's a lot more convenient to dump it down the throat where it can pull double duty as lubricant and be recycled than have it come out the front all the time.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoGiven the comments here so far, I'd suggest the article's title be replaced with its subtitle: > We have very little idea where anuses come from This also more accurately describes what the article is about.
- yakubin 5y agoHuman pregnancy is not an evolutionary marvel. It brings disproportionately more suffering and is more dangerous to the mother than in other species.
- taneq 5y agoAll worth it for those extra few CCs of brain!
- robotresearcher 5y agoNever forget which organ is telling you this.
- samus 5y agoThe size of the woman's pelvis actually restricts further evolutionary brain growth. Babies being unable to be born because of too big heads fits the very definition of an evolutionary deadend. Marsupials and eggs don't have that restriction (pun intended).
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoFortunately we can now bypass this dead end with cesarean section.
- Turing_Machine 5y agoThe scrotum has all the marks of successive bad, hacky evolutionary patching. Problem: Warm-bloodedness means the testicles are now too warm to work well. Hack #1: Hang them on the outside of the body so they can stay cooler. New problem resulting from first hack: Now they're much easier to damage. Hack #2: Make them hurt really bad if they get bashed, so the owner takes great care to guard them. The proper solution would have to make them more temperature-tolerant in the first place. Interestingly, ovaries didn't go down this road, though there are certainly some suboptimal designs in that whole system as well.
- sebmellen 5y agoDon’t forget, they can also torse and twist (just like ovaries, I might add).
- domino24 5y agoI guess we humans are still an evolutionary work in progress. :D
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoShudder to think what evolutionary completion looks like...
- tibbydudeza 5y ago> Interestingly, ovaries didn't go down this road A fixed quantity of viable eggs within prime child bearing years until menopause when women would then perform other roles within the community.
- the_af 5y ago> Not to be snarky, but isn’t every part of a successful organism an evolutionary marvel? I prefer Stephen Jay Gould's point that lots of evolved subsystems are just kludges and jury-rigged solutions that just happen to work good enough, sort of. ("The Panda's Thumb").
- Marsymars 5y agoFrom a 2001 issue of Scientific American, If Humans Were Built to Last: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12096406_If_Humans_Were_Built_to_Last https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12096406_If_Humans_... (That 13-year-old me read at the time when I stumbled across it in my grandfather's study.)
- rajlego 5y agoIf you read some of John Sarno's stuff on psychosomatic pain, it seems highly plausible that most pain is just psychosomatic in nature. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VyH1laOd2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VyH1laOd2M good video on this
- Noumenon72 5y agoAfter curing my lower back pain through weightlifting, it seems more like a well-designed system that just needs coordinated muscle use to protect. We just aren't in the conditions that teach us how to use gluteus medius, hamstrings, and torso rotation instinctively any more.