Slashdot Mirror
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."
In addition to convenience, there's a good reason the brain is located in the head...in close proximity to the major sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, mouth). This placement minimizes the time lag of neural impulse conduction, by minimizing the necessary length of nerve connecting the sensory organs to the brain. For this reason, I wouldn't expect many species to evolve with a larger-than-necessary distance between their brain and their sensory organs (unless such creature evolved a much faster method of conducting nerve impulses than we possess).From TFA:
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
how's that a change?
...Having reproductive organs in the mouth would make my life far too complicated.
...look suspiciously like the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Sig? - yeah, whatever.
"we may have to meet these bug-eyed freaks sometime in our lifetime"
Dare to dream. Personally, I say we drop everything and try to make the reception on cell phones better.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
"What has six limbs, a prehensile tail, its brain in its chest, and reproductive organs in its mouth?"
My last date.
I guess that precludes chilli and bony fish — just cold rice pudding and hot grits from now on!
I present you the five-assed monkey!
http://religiousfreaks.com/Even though 99.9999% of all gods are about as real as the Easter Bunny
.0001% there, buddy. Next time don't do the calculation on an old Pentium.
You're off by
Many anthropologists, socioligist, and biologists agree that humans have essentially stopped their own evolution, or at least slowed it to a crawl. Evolution is the long-term response of continuously having to adapt to your environment. However, because of civilization, the large majority of humanity simply adapts its environment around them instead.
That being said, wouldn't it make more sense to look at our evolutionary development and compare it with the rest of the animal kingdom. In this way, scientists might identify actual possible improvements which would simply be considered the evolution of homo sapiens (I shudder to think what would happen if I include the word homo in a sentence on Slashdot). For instance, if our legs bent inwards (backwards) at the knee, like say a stork's legs, we could run faster, jump higher, and sit down more easily.
The meddling in this article, and that is all it is, would in the end create not an alternate human but an altogether different and completely unrelated species.
There's no particular necessity that the brain would form in the head
In modern humans the heart is positioned midway between the brain and the genitals, pumping blood to both.
I think I can cope with the extra limbs and pre-hensile tail. While certain evolutionary changes did reduce us to four-limbed tail-less creatures, I suppose there could be certain circumstances where at the least we could've kept the tail. The notions about reproduction and the brain are a bit odd.
As others have pointed out, the human brain would make most logical sense in the head. Being near the sensory organs is rather important to ensure fast response to external stimuli. Also, the chest cavity makes for a lousy place for brain storage. I guess the ribs and like could've evolved differently, but it just doesn't seem like an effective barrier. It is also mid-mass so your brain would get bounced around with just normal moving and sleeping. Not really a great idea. At least in the head it is fairly protected from that sort of stress.
The reproductive organs...well I just would not want to think about the trouble this would cause. Our mouths already have a confusing time with the eating and breathing. There are problems with this system mind you. Our bodies don't seem to like the idea of eating and breathing much at the same time. Also, I think I would rather have my less pleasant bodily functions sharing space with my reproductive organs than with place where I eat, drink and breath. Also, reproductive organs would have bad protection in your mouth. Besides the dangers of self mutilation (I mean imagine if this thing bit its own balls), the area is grossly exposed. The mouth is technically an external area that receives a great deal more bacteria then your lower regions.
For any major change to have occured in the evolutionary path, something major would have to happen to the environment. Environment played a huge roll in our evolutionary path, and I would like to think that genetics, natural selection and all that fun stuff worked together to produce the best form possible.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Kyle: Watch out Stan, genetic engineers are crazy!!!
South Park, Episode 105, An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig
"...reproductive organs in its mouth"
Whose?
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
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
This goes to show the problem of trying to use any design on such complicated systems as biological organisms. Reproductive organs are relatively external in the male because their requirements are very different from the other organs like the heart and kidneys. In they female they also require unique capabilities. The jaw cannot be as functionally flexible as the pelvis and cervix is. What woman would want to deliver through her mouth? A brain in the chest might have some serious overheating problems on top of the wiring issues mentioned elsewhere. Etc...
Evolution has proven superbly effective at creating workable systems because any component which is serious suboptimal causes the extinction of the entire line that contains it. Nature is extremely wasteful in the trial and error process which is natural selection, but nature is also extremely prolific so those creatures that survive can thrive on the failure of others. No designed organism can compete with an organism that evolved, even if that evolved organism has some defects like vestigial organs or an enhanced tendancy towards cancer in the post reproductive years.
I find this one of the biggest defects in the whole (un)intelligent design argument, what I call (u)ID. Design is not a desirable process, it is actually undesirable. A designed creature is not at all to be considered better or more noble than one that wasn't designed. Quite the opposite, as the preposterous article shows. Designs are oversimplistic, inflexible, assume fixed conditions in the environment, and cannot function beyond their designed requirements specifications. For things as trivially simplistic as watches or cars or air traffic control systems, the process of designing the product may be profitable (though even there it can be difficult or impossible to achieve all goals), but not for something as complex as a living organism.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
bothering around with all this DNA stuff, why not just remove the bottom two ribs?? Then, we can our own reporductive organs in our mouth!
Why didn't I get the beta to Spore too?
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
We will wear our underroos on our head?
It hangs out of your body to stay cool. Curiously they're both hairy to.
We haven't stopped it, we've only altered the rules. Finding food and escaping predators is no longer much of an evolutionary influence. There are quite a few new things which can cause us to fail to reproduce. Humans will likely evolve in time to become less susceptible to cancer and asthma caused by air pollution, more likely to survive car crash trauma, be more tolerant of lead and mercury, and less likely to suffer negative effects such as heart disease from overconsumption of food. Women whose genetics prevent birth control from working well are currently far more likely to reproduce than others, so we will likely see some tolerance in the general population (although the medications will likely change at a much faster rate than we can evolve around). This is all just speculation though, I'm not a biologist.
Fur is high maintenance. It gets all over, has to be brushed a lot, harbors parasites, and makes it hard to keep cool.
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My dog has a brutal time in summer:
http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/kira_grinni
Some dog owners just give their pups a full body trim in late spring.
Unless we start building household fabricators that can handle the demand, manufacturers of clothing, medical gear, and personal care products are going to have to come up with whole new lines to support each new model of human.
I mean, dang! Imagine trendy parents who have kids of four different models. Back to school clothes shopping would be a real bitch. "Oh, look Tiffany, Sextopodal Kids "R" Us is having a sale on those . . . RONALD! Get your hands out of your mouth this instance!"
I seem to remember John Smart talking about "developmental optimum" that evolution settles into. The eye most people get, having one doesn't give stereo vision, and three is redudant so the extra requirements of having a third eye get pared out over time. There are also some reasons having five fingers having to do with gripping a rock so it could be thrown accurately at ninety miles an hour. Get a pack of hairy men all throwing at a single predator/prey and they've got a serious problem. Our thowing abilities aren't too important today, granted, but consider how much engineering and design work would need to be completely redone to accomadate a couple extra digits. Sad to see this sensational article completely ignore the body of reasearch in this area.
You could be right, but we don't know for sure. It depends on how one defines sentience, and what we discover as we explore the oceans, as we're just beginning to do.
The case could be made that the mollusc body plan is the most successful on the planet. Squid, for instance, out-mass pretty much all other animals, in an astonishing variety of ecological niches (okay, not sure about krill... any biologists care to refresh my memory?). Molluscs can be found in just about any part of the earth.
As far as sentience goes, if humans crap out and extinct ourselves, my vote for the next evolutionary chance at the reign of intelligence would be for the cephalopods. They're adaptable, have a proven problem-solving intelligence, are highly communicative in ways we're just beginning to understand, have excellent eyesight, and octopuses in particular are highly dextrous.
Don't underestimate the mighty mollusc.
Damn those pesky terrorists
...
When we are a million species spreading through the galaxy, the questions 'Can man play God and still stay sane?' will lose of of its terrors. We shall be playing God, but only as local dieties and not as lords of the universe. There is safety in numbers. Some of us will become insane , and rule over empires as crazy as Doctor Moreau's island. Some of use will shit on the morning star. There will be conflicts and tragedies. But in the long run, the sane will adapt and survive better than the insane. Nature's pruning of the unfit will limit the spread of insanity among the species in the galaxy, as it does among individuals on earth.
...
The expansion of life over the universe is a beginning, not an end. At the same time as life is extending its habitat quantitatively, it will also be changing and evolving qualitatively into dimensions of mind and spirit that we cannot imagine. The acquisition of new territory is important, not as an end in itself, but as a means to enable life to experiment with intelligence in a million different forms."
-- "The Greening of the Galaxy," Freeman Dyson, 1979
I have a few of my own ideas, as well as comments on his article.
First, while people are arguing about brain in chest vs head due to nerve length, nobody is mentioning one of the other impracticalities of his suggestions. Namely, the brain in the chest would require a larger chest cavity, thus a larger torso, and more weight. As well, the extra pair of arms would add to this. The heart would likely need to be larger to support the extra mass. Also, I think the brain would not be as free to grow/evolve to larger sizes when surrounded by all this ribcage, heart, lungs.
Instead, I think we could really benefit from the addition of one or two more hearts. Why are all our other organs redundant? (even the brain is a dual organ)
In the area of reproduction, instead of putting genitals in our mouths, take another cue from the bird world... Let's keep our reproduction like it is, but make women lay eggs. If sexual intercourse caused a woman to develop an infant-sized egg that she had to lay three days later, we would probably see a lot fewer teen pregnancies. In addition, a fetus developing in the egg would allow much more flexibility in prenatal care. It would likewise put an immediate end to the abortion issue, as the debate would no longer encompass a woman's right to do as she pleases with her body.
One of the more interesting possibilities in medicine today is that scientists may be able to reactivate the gene responsible for regeneration of organs, so you could re-grow lost kidneys, lungs, even limbs, as we can already regrow liver tissue. That's a wonderful bit of evolution that we lost, I can't possibly imagine why.
Finally, while he's taking ideas from some of the animal world, why not give our new and improved human, who I like to call Homo Novo, spinnerets so we can make our own rope, easily glue and fasten things or in a bind even make our own clothes? I admit, it would put the packing tape industry out of business, but it might afford the chance for some exciting new sports, as competitors try to tie each other up, rapell down buildings, or even the new art form of web design (oh, I guess we'd have to come up with a different name).
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
I remember reading years ago about limited experiments suggesting that people that wore special caps that circulated cool water through them performed better on intelligence tests than those that didn't. Those first tested without the cap saw their test scores improve when tested with the cap. I wonder if this was ever expanded upon; if it's true, it wouldn't be that hard to build something like that.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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
"I, for one, welcome our new genetically engineered alternate human overlords." /.?
I can't believe I had to be the one to say this. WTF is happening to
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Don't you think it might be a little more accurate if you separated those that are killing BECAUSE of religious reasons, as opposed to those that aren't? China and the USSR were doing all their killing for governmental/control reasons, to maintain their fascist state or during a revolution. That's pretty distinct from religious types who are killing people simply for worshiping the wrong gods. It's dishonest to try to put the two groups together. What you should be comparing are religious nuts who kill for religious reasons, and atheists who specifically target believers because of their religion. And if you actually do that, I'm pretty sure the religious types will win.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
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.
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?
that babies are made when mommy and daddy kiss a lot.
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.
We've known for years that many (if not most) people have a brain in their colon. It is the natural result of having your head up your ass.
I flinch when your wife tells me that too. Man, she can go on for hours. She talks forever too.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Actually scarring is what mammals have instead of regeneration. Due to our higher energy metabolisms, we can't afford the weeks of downtime without eating to regenerate like reptiles can.
Instead, we evolved scarring, which cuts off resources to an area in the hopes that we can still feed ourselves without it. As another benefit, we close off wounds from infection faster than animals with regeneration.
Studies in mice have shown that shutting off the ability to scar leads to regeneration. The ability lies with in us, but it closed off by the benefits of scarring. Now, under modern societial pressure, we may be better off learning how to suppress scarring since it no longer means an inability to feed ourselves. Some have argued that organ regeneration will be the antibiotics of the 21st century in that it will revolutionize medicine.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.