10 Worst Evolutionary Designs

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."

Comments

Old

[hyperion2010]

This was posted 2 weeks ago, it was stupid then and is stupid now. Also, go back to digg with your lists kthxby.

Re:Old

[RobertB-DC]

This was posted 2 weeks ago, it was stupid then and is stupid now. Also, go back to digg with your lists kthxby.

I second that emotion. The most notable thing about the list is that it shows a possibly-unhealthy level of interest in non-human reproduction on the part of the author -- five out of the ten, including "slug genitalia" and "hyena clitoris". Mr. Wolman should either get into a college-level comparative anatomy class, or into therapy.

And lists aren't such a bad thing, in and of themselves. I've gotten addicted to the Cracked Mazagine (sic) lists of things like "The 6 Most Badass Murder Weapons in the Animal Kingdom". Compare those with the Wired.com list, and you can't help but wonder if Cracked already saw this list... and stamped it "REJECTED".

Re:Old

[spire3661]

MY thoughts precisely. It is REALLY hard to make a list of bad evolution using SUCCESSFUL examples. Regardless of the weirdness of the design, it WORKS over the other designs that were submitted over the eons.

Humans

[Kittenman]

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...

Re:Humans

[Bertie]

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.

Re:Humans

[colinrichardday]

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

It also allows us to use our hands better, for things like wielding weapons against animals that would kill us otherwise.

Re:Humans

[ceoyoyo]

1) Don't listen to some article writer at Wired to learn what is or is not a bad birth process. Several of the ones he mentioned seem silly until you know more about them, then they make sense. Other things that continue to seem silly may do so because we just haven't figured them out yet. Similarly, lots of irreducible complexity arguments that originally seemed convincing have famously fallen to new insights.

2) Evolution doesn't produce "perfection" or even necessarily approach it. Evolution is an optimization process. It can certainly get stuck in local minima.

Re:Humans

[Fujisawa Sensei]

This is something that I've always found hard to understand with the argument for evolution. Surely the natural selection process would strongly bias against any traits that result in the animal being killed off in the first few minutes. (And likewise a strong bias towards traits that improve birth mortality rates). Yet we see so many instances of "poor design" in the birth process. Four in this article alone.

If natural selection does such a "poor" job of refining the birthing mechanism when there is a clear correlation between some new (good or bad) trait and the likelihood of that trait being propagated to future generations, then how can we reasonably expect that it is also responsible for highly refined systems where there is a much lower correlation between the new trait and the likelihood of producing offspring. (For example, in esoteric features of the imune system, or the brain - the new trait may only even come into play in certain situations during the animals life, and therefore only has any selective power in the specific animals for which it occurs ... unlike traits relating to birth which are immediately tested for all creatures)

If evolution is about compromise, then the most obvious compromises would favour succesful birth. If birth is unsuccesful than other traits don't even get a chance to be tested.

Considering the following.

Evolution is flawed, makes sense because its an ongoing process.

Creatures are flawed, through the deliberate act of the creator. That makes the creator either a dipshit, or an asshole.

Take your choice.

Re:Humans

[Kral_Blbec]

He isnt saying poor design. He is saying there are a whole lot of traits that would have had/have zero reproductive advantage, yet are clearly evident in modern animals.
I tend to agree. My example is the elephant. The first animals (presumably like a pig) had a short nose. Some random member of the species gets born with a slightly longer nose. Not much mind you, because they cant have very much variation in only one generation, so this nose is barely noticeable to be longer, yet it has so much reproductive advantage that generations later the short snout has evolved to a long trunk? It doesnt make sense.
Another example, this one from the stupid list in the article. Dolphins and whales breathe through a blow hole. Supposedly their ancestors where land mammals that returned to the sea after having had developed for land. At first they held their breath and breathed like every other land mammal, meaning they stayed near the surface. How does their breathing tract move from their mouth, to another orifice? That isn't something that could have been done incrementally.
Granted evolution makes a lot of sense when you look at it and say "it had X million years to change from this to that", but when you get into individual generations, there are a lot of things that COULD NOT have developed because the change from one generation to another would not have been reproductively advantageous. A pig with a nose .2 centimeters longer than another is not going to breed so much more than his friends that the noses of the species are effected.

Re:Humans

[SilverEyes]

If that individual doesnt reproduce, then that mutation (benificial or adverse) is lost.

Yes.

When a mutation of significance happens, which might be once every few hundred generations, that individual is the only one that can pass it along. It has to reproduce so much more than normal that it has enough offspring that the mutation is preserved through not only the first generation, but the second, third and so on. Remember, each generation it goes through, there is only a 50/50 chance that the offspring will have it too.

Many animals will have multiple generations of offspring. There may be a 50/50 chance for a specific mutation (that is only linked through one gene) to be passed on, but if the offsprings chances improve, they will be more successful at reproduction, and their offspring as well.

Mutations in genetics during reproduction are actually pretty rare. Note that mutations later in life dont matter because they no longer have the ability to affect the entire organism. It is a localized mutation, like cancer.

Rare for a particular part of the gene. Even one mutation in a million base pairs works out to some mutations per generation for any sizable genome. Animals have lots of DNA. I'm assuming you're talking about a mutation rate in terms of base pairs. If you're talking about encoding proteins and so forth, then obviously it's much lower and I apologize for pointing this out.

Even considering the age of the universe and the earth, there isnt enough time for random chance to have created life as we know it. For the slightest change to a species as a whole, it would require not one, but many individuals to have the same mutation (requiring untold generations to pass), and for them all to reproduce so much more than normal that it spreads to the entire offspring population.

Not enough time for random chance -absolutely-, but evolution is a higher order function. It occurs in subtler ways, and in parallel across every species.

Re:Humans

[SilverEyes]

Evolution keeps lots of things that aren't necessarily advantageous, they can't just be disadvantageous enough to make a significant impact on the population.
As long as we're both being speculative, here's a shot (and I guarantee my shot in the dark here is wrong, but it's an attempt). Perhaps elephant ancestors have a gene that regulates expression of a protein that controls cartilage. Due to a random mutation, an extra promotor for this protein uncovered from 'junk DNA', and this ancestor expresses the gene in far greater quantities. As a result, a species of pig-sized elephant ancestors develops large noses and ears. Complete with more area to develop on, more olfactory nerve clusters are in the nose, and the ears provide a greater area to gather sound. The mammalian brain, being a malleable enough organ to learn new patterns, identifies the extra sensitivity to sound and smell and can detect more predators easily. Over time, subsequent species find that directing their noses with a finer degree of muscle control (the protein to promote growth of muscle attaching to cartilage has been exapted from the muscles controlling the ears for better directional hearing) allows them to more accurately sniff out delicious tubers, which they dig using their newly evolving tusks. Suddenly, during a drought, proto-elephants (or whatever you want to call them) are able to retain enough water by digging for roots, whereas their less fortunate relatives die off. This new behaviour and trunk-like appendage becomes increasingly useful, acquiring more and more encoding genes and proteins causing a sort of runaway evolution.

Re:Humans

[joeyblades]

Your examples are only confounding because

1. You don't have enough information to comprehend the selective advantages
2. You make assumptions about the limits of evolution
3. It makes you uncomfortable within your belief system

Just because you can't think of a reproductive advantage, doesn't mean there isn't / wasn't one. The details of the selective pressures that drove most evolutionary changes are lost to unrecorded history.

You assume that snouts can only evolve 0.2cm in a single generation but, perhaps they can, with the right mutation, lengthen 20cm within one generation.

You assume that blow holes moved fractions of centimeters per eon from some other uncertain location, but perhaps they simply erupted from the back of the existing breathing apparatus in one evolutionary jump.

To be sure, the evolutionary evidence for most dramatic body plan changes seems to support the slow and incremental, but there is evidence that evolution can take dramatic steps in shorter periods of time.

Just because an idea makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn't mean you should reject it. Most great steps in human thought were initially rejected as untenable because they challenged the existing belief systems.

Re:Humans

[MightyMartian]

You're thinking from an engineer's point of view, but evolution simply does not work like that. Evolution is, at its core, the concept of differential reproduction. Very few traits are absolutely beneficial, and even if they were, the environment can change quickly. In fact optimization can be downright bad for a species. Species that are too tightly bound to specific environments can be thrown into serious trouble when environmental change happens.

If environments were static, maybe you could reach a permanent equilibrium, but environments are not. There are constant pressures on populations, and that makes optimization pretty much impossible.

Evolution is really a statistical science. An trait's survival isn't so much a yes-no, but more a trend. Think of human birth. Yes, it's true, we're born far more prematurely than most mammals, and even at that, passage through the birth canal can lead to death in both the infant and mother. But the survival advantages of having a large brain are so great that the trade-off of higher infant and mother mortality rates is more than offset. You also have to consider that traits don't exist in isolation. Yes, it would be better if the birth canal were widened so that passage of the infant were easier, or maybe even allowing a longer gestation period to permit the birth of more mature offspring, but now you would start intruding on pelvic size, and that means severe disabilities as far as mobility. Since bipedalism also confers substantial benefits on our species, it means there is a physical limit on how large the pelvic area can get before females would no longer be effectively upright. Thus you have two competing traits, and what you ultimately get is the trade-off, that women can still walk, although the center of gravity is different, a sacrifice to some degree of mobility and strength.

Re:Humans

[holmstar]

How does their breathing tract move from their mouth, to another orifice?

It didn't! Most animals breath mostly through their noses, not their mouths. The nostrils of the proto-dolphins migrated from the tip of the nose to the top of the head, presumably because being able to breathe while keeping your head level/pointed downward has a survival benefit... easier to see enemies/food/whatever swimming through the water, probably.

Spartan Giraffes

[Knave75]

Perhaps the great fall is a way to cull the weak giraffes. Those that do not survive the 5 foot drop would never have been successful in the wild. Ditto for the slow-evolving shark siblings. If your brother eats you in the womb and you do not adequately defend yourself, then you simply did not deserve to live.

Seriously though, evolution does not provide traits that are advantageous, it simply removes those that are disadvantageous, relative to other traits. That is a subtle but important difference. Eating your brothers and sisters in-utero sounds pretty gross, but unless it hurts the reproductive rate of those who carry that gene, there is no reason to weed it out.

Re:Spartan Giraffes

[tool462]

Exactly. The only way I can think of to even start to consider a "worst evolutionary design" would have to be in terms of adaptability. I.e., how sensitive is the life form to small changes in its environment? Even that is full of problems though, as "best" and "worst" are measured only relative to the current environment. Any stable population could be considered the best solution for its environment--at least a local maximum, if not global.

As a side note, this thread is also why you should never invite a pedant to a party. We have the capability of sucking the joy out of nearly any conversation.

Re:Spartan Giraffes

[geekoid]

"...evolution does not provide traits that are advantageous, ..."
Yes it does.

"it simply removes those that are disadvantageous"
That would assume you ahve all traits at the 'beginning'.

New traits can develop from new mutations.

You seem to be a little too Lamarkian.

Re:Spartan Giraffes

[v1]

"...evolution does not provide traits that are advantageous, ..."
Yes it does.

Possibly more correct to say that evolution continuously offers random features which may or may not be advantageous, and the features which are detrimental to its survival tend to be removed from the gene pool.

OP is correct in saying that evolution in itself doesn't provide anything specifically helpful. It does encourage traits that happen to be beneficial though. Evolution is not the process of trying improvements, that's what heterosexual reproduction is for. The purpose of evolution is to improve on the survival of the accidentally better designs.

There are an insane number of good examples, but I'll toss out a good one now. Sickle Cell Anemia. Sucks if you have it, has a variety of nasty side effects and no visible benefit. Except if you live in say, Nicaragua, and are exposed to malaria-bearing mosquitoes all the time. Something about the cell shape defies the virus, SCA sufferers are immune to malaria. So the SCA expression there is very very high because although it grants a disadvantage, it also grants an advantage. Interesting thing about SCA is you only need one gene to have immunity, and require both to get the nasty side effects. But it's advantageous enough to be kept.

Another worst design.

[kurt555gs]

The Pontiac Aztec. God they were ugly.

Re:Another worst design.

[RockWolf]

The Pontiac Aztec. God they were ugly.

Must've been evolution, because there sure wasn't a lot of intelligent design that went into that one...

If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid

[Cyberax]

"If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid" - that also applied to evolutionary designs.

Also, some of these 'design issues' might in truth be advantages. For example, sea mammals can swim through oxygen-depleted dead waters just fine - they don't depend on dissolved oxygen.

Re:Gut bacteria

[jonored]

The apparatus to ferment cellulose into digestibles internally is rather large and high-maintainence. There's the multiple 'stomachs' before the main one where the bacteria breed, the cow routinely vomits up some to mechanically reprocess, and occasionally when venting becomes blocked for any reason a cow dies becuase their lungs were crushed by the expanding gasses in their stomach. termites get away with a lot because of being small. Additionally, there was that study that indicated that developments in the human intellect were associated with us starting to use cooking as an external digestion method - might not be the best thing for us in particular to add digesting some of the hardest foodstuff to use when we already diverted that energy to brainpower. And if we use cows properly we get the best of both worlds anyways - fueling ourselves off of cellulose with only the effort of keeping a few cows to eat. Of course, we don't, and use them as an inefficient step between stuff we /can/ eat and us, but that's another issue.

Purpose of the beer gut

[turing_m]

Storing fat is a useful way of surviving famine or food shortages. Unfortunately the stored fat always makes the male less athletic, less able to fight, hunt, evade, etc. Storing extra fat on the gut/love handle area is probably the best compromise for athletic purposes - lowest center of gravity possible without adding excess weight to the legs (which have to change direction rapidly).

The worst places to store fat in large quantities are at the extremities such as fingers, toes, hands, feet, forearms, calves and the head, because of the reduction to athletic performance.

Ass, thighs and chest aren't as great as the mid-section but aren't terrible. These areas are where women usually store their fat because if they stored it on their gut men can't tell if they are are pregnant or not.

It's fun, but don't draw conclusions from it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh isn't this a great parlour game! Did you know that the retina is backwards, which is why we have a blind spot? How horrible, how inefficient!

These types of things are all very fun to discuss. But please oh PLEASE do not draw any inferences from them. They don't mean ANYTHING, from a philosophical or theological perspective.

(Example) The vagus nerve in giraffe's neck is as long and ungainly as it is because of the way it develops in the fetus. To make it more efficient in the adult would require a change in the course of fetal development. And depending on how you change the course of fetal development, other things need to change, too. This is a very large and complex system of interconnected dependencies. To look at one isolated phenotypic feature and say, "Hey, I could have designed that better!" bespeaks of a total lack of knowledge about what all is involved in development.

I will say for the record that I believe in evolution, not intelligent design. But whenever I heard people "on my side" using examples like this as "evidence" for NOT intelligent design it frustrates me. You have absolutely no idea the entire bredth of changes -- on every level, from genetics to protein synthesis to overall development -- that would be required to make whatever "inefficient design" work better. It isn't as simple as looking at the adult and saying "this nerve should go here, instead!"

So, that's my little rant. Examples like these are fun. They're entertaining. They're cute.

They are "evidence" of absolutely nothing.

design!

[fermion]

There are so many bad "designs". baby butterflies dying because they can't get out of the cocoon. Reasonable from an evolutionary perspective, but what designer would want to kill baby butterflies.

Or what about pain that will never go away. What is the purpose of have a burn victim still feel pain days after the injury. Or lifelong back pain. What kind of design relishes in making organisms suffer for no apparent reason?

Then of course there is sex. From a procreation point of view, one would the process to be as simple as possible, not a few to several minutes of interaction. One could have designed us so the interaction was separate from reproduction. That way we could couple as needed, to have orgasms, but then make babies only when it was useful. The combination of the two is obvious trickery, and it says something about the design.

Re:Not Design!

[sleeponthemic]

Not to mention the fact that people shouldn't confuse evolution for "perfection". We're choosing an arbitrary point in time (now) to draw a line in the sand, claiming organisms should be perfectly adapted at this point. Wrong.

Not evolutionary design ....

[gstoddart]

It's not really evolutionary design, it's evolutionary results.

Evolution doesn't sit down at the drawing board and try to figure out how to give birth to a giraffe. This is the end result of bazillions of little experiments that ended up with the rather comic/disturbing notion of a baby giraffe falling that far.

I'm sure to an advanced species, our mating habits, genitals, mode of breathing, and whatnot look hilarious. :-P

Cheers

journey not a destination

[gurps_npc]

Evolution is a process, not an end goal. The creatures described here are not 'completed', but are instead a work in progress. Also note, many of the 'issues' have secret advantages. For example a whale can dive deeper than most fish can swim because of the huge lungs that go with the blow hole instead of the gills that are more limited.