5 ms·

If we chew on enough of these lozenges, will our teeth merge into one, curved megatooth?

OJFord 5y ago
And why haven't we evolved to have that yet anyway? It's surely better, nowhere for food to get stuck? (Assuming it can still be molar/canine/incisor like in different places on that plane.)
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  We haven’t even evolved to have a single set of teeth. We’re born with stand ins that grow out and push “baby” teeth out. They’re pretty much set up to be disposable, we just haven’t evolved a good replacement pipeline.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > And why haven't we evolved to have that yet anyway? It's surely better, nowhere for food to get, stuck? (Assuming it can still be molar/canine/incisor like in different places on that plane.) Well, in software terms, you're describing a monolithic architecture. A single cavity would destroy the whole thing. You'd probably have to replace the choppers more frequently as your skull grows into adulthood, or we would have to be born with larger jaws that don't need to grow as much as we mature. There is also the matter of how evolvable the platform would be. As a species, we're in the process of losing our wisdom teeth, and I suspect that would be harder to do if the skull/jaw/gum/tooth platform was... more tightly coupled, less modular. I myself never had any wisdom teeth, and kept a couple of my milk teeth into my 40s before one had to be replaced with a crown, and the other just fell out when the root dissolved. Human dentition has a lot of variability. Still, birds did it (as have other species over the Earth's long evolutionary history), so it isn't an insoluble challenge, but it would be a rather more radical change than just fusing teeth together.
- riffraff 5y ago
  my understanding is that we're basically not supposed to live long enough to care, evolution didn't have time to overcorrect for abundance of sugar and people living into old age.

And why haven't we evolved to have that yet anyway? It's surely better, nowhere for food to get stuck? (Assuming it can still be molar/canine/incisor like in different places on that plane.)

eyelidlessness 5y ago
We haven’t even evolved to have a single set of teeth. We’re born with stand ins that grow out and push “baby” teeth out. They’re pretty much set up to be disposable, we just haven’t evolved a good replacement pipeline.
webmaven 5y ago
> And why haven't we evolved to have that yet anyway? It's surely better, nowhere for food to get, stuck? (Assuming it can still be molar/canine/incisor like in different places on that plane.) Well, in software terms, you're describing a monolithic architecture. A single cavity would destroy the whole thing. You'd probably have to replace the choppers more frequently as your skull grows into adulthood, or we would have to be born with larger jaws that don't need to grow as much as we mature. There is also the matter of how evolvable the platform would be. As a species, we're in the process of losing our wisdom teeth, and I suspect that would be harder to do if the skull/jaw/gum/tooth platform was... more tightly coupled, less modular. I myself never had any wisdom teeth, and kept a couple of my milk teeth into my 40s before one had to be replaced with a crown, and the other just fell out when the root dissolved. Human dentition has a lot of variability. Still, birds did it (as have other species over the Earth's long evolutionary history), so it isn't an insoluble challenge, but it would be a rather more radical change than just fusing teeth together.
riffraff 5y ago
my understanding is that we're basically not supposed to live long enough to care, evolution didn't have time to overcorrect for abundance of sugar and people living into old age.