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An Alternate Human
B0b Barker writes "What has six limbs, a prehensile tail, its brain in its chest, and reproductive organs in its mouth? The alternate human designed by biologist PZ Myers in Remaking Humanity, a story in Forbes.com's package on Reinvention. It may sound fantastic, but researchers are already working to re-build DNA, proteins and cells in a new field called synthetic biology, and we may have to meet these bug-eyed freaks sometime in our lifetime."
I wonder if heat dissipation is a better reason. IIRC, the brain represents about 2% of your mass, but radiates about 20% of your body heat.
Whether that's a good thing (brain needs cooling because of all the circuitry in there), or a bad thing (unneccessary heat loss), I'll leave to the biologists. Also, the question of whether it might actually be more efficient to cool the brain in the chest due to liquid cooling.
The sense of touch in my feet does not appear to be having a problem with distance. Maybe I just don't notice the latency, but I definately have sensory receptors all over the body that work just fine.
The sense of touch in your feet also updates a helluva lot less frequently than your sense of sight.
It's one thing to have a bit of latency on a low-bandwidth sense like touch... it's another thing alltogether to have high latency on a high-bandwidth application like sight... especially when reflexes determine how long a creature survives.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Who was it that called Forbes something like a sort of corporate porn for middle management?
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Who cares about the sense of touch in your feet? All our major predator avoidance senses...Sight, Hearing, Smell...ALL of them, are proximate to the brain. Evolution clearly favors this (since all things that actually HAVE brains, have them right next to their major senses), and common sense would suggest that traveling three inches is faster than traveling 3 feet, given a constant velocity.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It hangs out of your body to stay cool. Curiously they're both hairy to.
Have you ever dissected a brain? Really? I mean open it up and look at the structure?
The optic nerve connects into the brain straight back from the eyes. Straight path, single crossover in the optic chiasm. The signal is eventually routed to the back of the brain (posterior) where the visual cortex is located, but there are several important things that seem to happen first.
Get your physiology straight.
Length may still not be an issue, but there is a definable cost to longer nerves. We typically don't notice, but the speed of nerve impulses is, IIRC, about 200mph. Thus in an object the size of a human, the longest distance is still very short and the trip time is barely noticeable. Compared to electricity, however, this is abysmally slow. This is why in the game ShadowRun the concept of 'wired reflexes' sort of made sense. The concept was that they replaced all muscle controlling nerves with copper wires that provided extremely fast reflexes. The idea is accurate, although currently unworkable and likely completely pointless (at some point processing speed is more of an issue than actual nerve-impulse speed.
Just a few thoughts.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
As far as I'm concerned, if I'm going to lose my head - my brain may as well go with it.
I'm no expert in this sort of stuff but my guess would be that the spinal cord is actually a newer more advanced system and the vagus nerve is the more primative of the two structures. I would guess the vagus nerve dates back to when hearts and lungs started appearing in organisms and not the other way around as your post implies. The importance of that is the vagus nerve was not something that decided the survivability of our ancestors; it was some other species a billion years ago or so who developed it to survive.
Kinda like Windows, just keep building on top!
This happens because you have so much blood flowing through your brain. Your brain doesn't need cooling. It's not a friggin processor. Why do you think you have hair on your head? It's to insulate all of the blood carrying oxygen to your brain so it doesn't leak off as much heat.
So, it sounds like they just re-invented puppeteers?
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
This "improvement" of moving the brain from the head to the chest cavity is (IMHO) based on a faulty premise; that it would be better protected. The brain floats in a liquid suspension enclosed in thick bone container (the skull). It is without a doubt the most heavily protected of our internal organs. The organs in the chest cavity are protected only a thin latice of bones (the rib cage). Take a visit to the emergency room and you'll see far more accident victims with broken ribs and internal bleeding than you will broken skulls and brain damage. I suppose you could put a skull-like enclosure around the entire chest cavity like a turtle's shell, but that would increase the weight of the creature and limit mobility (Aesop aside, the hare usually wins).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Designs are oversimplistic, inflexible, assume fixed conditions in the environment, and cannot function beyond their designed requirements specifications.
You must be a Windows programmer.
Evolution has proven superbly effective at creating workable systems...
Suppose I design an evolution process that is effective at creating workable systems, then by your claim, my design (evolution) must be oversimplistic, inflexible, assumes fixed conditions, and cannot function beyond specification. This is a contradiction to your claim, so evolution process must not be effective, or your statement about design is wrong.
Instead of "serious suboptimal causes" you should use the word "defect." Of course, no matter which words you use, your claim is a useless tautology, since a component that extincts is a component that has defect and vice versa.
But if you just say suboptimal, you can easily find someone who is biologically superior than you, then by your claim you should be extinct. But (I hope) this is not the case for you. There is observably some give or take on how suboptimal you can be. However, this implies that evolution is not so effective because it allows suboptimality, therefore a contradiction to your claim.
I hope other scientifically curious people are much more logically rigorous than you when defending evolution.
I once had a signature.
How about we fix the current problems with humans instead of making new humans with new problems. If I was a doctor I would be pissed, but if I was a sniper I would be happy.
Can I bum a sig?
You hit the nail right on the head.
The article's ideas about protecting various body parts are really not nearly as useful as the ability to regenerate bodily damage, a la X-Men's Wolverine and various microorganisms. Who cares if your testicles get damaged if you can just regenerate them (well, it might hurt some, but long-term it wouldn't be a problem).
More than any of these other ideas, effective and fast regeneration would be an extremely useful modification to make to people. No more paralyzed people, no more missing limbs, no more ugly scars...
No, its even more fucked up than that. Muslims, Jews, and Christians all worship the same god. We slit eachother's throats because we don't worship the same god in the same way.
Someone stop this planet, I want to get off!
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
yes, this is all speculation. I literally laughed out loud when I read this stuff. i will say that humans should be LESS likely to survive serious trauma with the advance of medicine. it is medical advances that allow severely injured humans to survive, and later reproduce. so a human having the natural ability to more likely survive the trauma from a car wreck gives no advantage to that person, because thanks to medical technologies, everyone else can survive it too.
so allow me one speculation:
humans average cranial circumference will increase. this would be due to cesarian-section births. before cesarian-sections, infants with heads too large to pass through the birth canal likely died in child birth, along with the mother.
Based on this theory of mine, whatever part of human skin is particularly ticklish, is (or was) an important sensory organ.
Feet sure qualify. I explain this by the need to react automatically to stepping on a snake or a scorpion.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Temperature sensations aren't transmitted as quickly as pain sensations are. Plus, you flinched before the impact because the eye detected somethign close to the face unexpectedly, which is separate from a flinch from an impact that you don't see coming. It's anticipatory rather than reactive.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I'm surprised no one has suggested this yet, but it's astonishing how many people die from choking on food or inhaling their own vomit after a traumatic injury or serious illness.
If I had to make a major modification to the human body plan, I would separate the mouth for breathing and talking from the mouth for eating.
Mammals by and large have bad eyesight -- it is supposed we evolved from tiny mole or shrew-like creatures that hid out of sight not to get snarfed up by dinosaurs; mammals only came out into the open and got large after the dinosaurs went away. Primates managed to evolve pretty OK eyesight -- not on an eagle or hawk level, but color vision (unusal for mammals), binocular vision for good depth perception and motion tracking.
Think of monkeys swinging from the trees. Think of humans driving cars. We may be frail and weak compared to other animals and even other primates, but we are darned good at driving cars.