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."

Comments

Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction

[Cervantes]

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.

Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction

[Zordak]

Wait a minute, are you questioning the scientific authority of an article in Forbes, the leading peer-reviewed, highly-respected scientific journal with a proven and unblemished history of unimpeachable accuracy?

Who was it that called Forbes something like a sort of corporate porn for middle management?

Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction

[cmallinson]

More distance between the brain and the sensory organs also presents the problem of having greater risk of damage to those (now longer) nerves. With the brain in the head, a blow to the neck can cause paralysis of the limbs. With the brain in the torso, a blow to the neck (or perhaps even lower vertebrae) would cause paralysis of the face, as well as rendering the individual deaf and blind. As bad as it would be to be quadriplegic, I'd take it over the alternative.

As far as I'm concerned, if I'm going to lose my head - my brain may as well go with it.

Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction

[CFTM]

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!

Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction

[moultano]

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.

Re:Problems of design

[pikine]

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.

...because any component which is serious suboptimal causes the extinction of the entire line that contains it

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.

Re:Oh boy...

[visgoth]

where wackos cut other's throats simply because they are not worshipping the same deity*

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!