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10 Worst Evolutionary Designs

Posted by samzenpus on from the everyone-makes-mistakes dept.

JamJam writes "Besides my beer gut, which I'm sure has some purpose, Wired is running a story on the 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs. Ranging from baby giraffes being dropped 5-foot during birth to Goliath bird-eating spiders that practically explode when they fall from trees."

2 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Humans by Kittenman · · Score: 5, Informative
    1) Knees

    2) Windpipe close to channel to stomach - choking hazard

    3) Walking upright leads to distended colon, piles, etc

    4) As my wife says, playground close to a sewage works

    And first post, BTW...

    --
    "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
    1. Re:Humans by Bertie · · Score: 5, Informative

      Ah, but...

      The design of our breathing/eating apparatus may be a choking hazard, but it gives us the ability to do a neat trick that no other animal can: speak.

      Ever noticed how babies can feed and breathe at the same time, but you can't? This is because of the shape of their vocal tract, which is more like an animal's than yours at that point. Babies need to get a lot of food down their necks as quickly as possible, because they're busy growing. Speaking can wait.

      After a few months, things start to move around - the larynx drops, the back of the throat curves round into a right-angle, and all of a sudden they have to choose between eating and breathing. But the reshaped vocal tract allows them to form configurations of the speech organs which weren't previously possible, and so they learn to speak.