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Evolution is the king of good enough. Things that work but have issues usually don't get 'revised'. For one of the funniest examples check out the recurrent lar
by rtkwe 2y ago
Evolution is the king of good enough. Things that work but have issues usually don't get 'revised'. For one of the funniest examples check out the recurrent laryngeal nerve which connects from your spine very close to your brain to your voice box... with a short little detour all the way down into your neck under your aortic arch back up to your voice box. [0] The main theory is it's a vestige of ancient fish anatomy and even shows up in GIRAFFES where it's over 4 meters long because it takes the same detour all the way down the neck.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#/media/File:Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#/med...
- alok-g 2y agoWow! Thanks for sharing. For the optic nerves in humans, a similar questiom comes -- Why does it connect to the rear side of the brain when the front is much closer! This perhaps relates animals having their eyes on the sides of the head and a relatively small brain positioned in a way that the eyes were closer to the rear side of the brain.
- rtkwe 2y agoI'm far from an evolutionary biologist but AFAIK the majority of our brain is a late addition in the scheme of our evolution from sludge to human and vision is connected to one of the older parts and the new parts are up towards the front. Another case of the iterative nature of evolution, the frontal cortex where most emotion processing happens came about and enlarged a lot through the evolution of chimps that eventually branched off into humans.