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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."
This was posted 2 weeks ago, it was stupid then and is stupid now. Also, go back to digg with your lists kthxby.
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
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.
The Pontiac Aztec. God they were ugly.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
"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.
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.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
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.
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.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
I record my sleeptalking
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
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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