*Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

This isn't a thread about evolution not being a correct theory (sorry stupid people). This is a thread about how evolution's screwed us and various other organisms over. Post examples of various things that evolution's done that you think are stupid, and maybe some other people can clarify why things turned out the way they did.

Here are mine:

1) The ear: When I first learned about the ear in biology, I was amazed out how many steps there are between sound getting into your ear and it registering with your brain. There are these bones with a bunch of cute names and some hairs swaying in some liquid and stuff. It seems to me that we'd be better off with just a membrane thin enough to vibrate and a nerve hooked up to it.

1) Inability to sleep at will: I've always thought this really sucked. It seems to me that people would be more productive if they could choose when to sleep. You'd still get tired if you didn't do it often enough, and pass out if you chose to stay up for way longer than you should, but you wouldn't have to lie in bed staring at the ceiling before a big day. It'd be more like going to the bathroom and less like breathing.

3) Like/Dislike for Certain Foods: It seems like we'd be much healthier if we just craved whatever foods had whatever nutrients we need most, and I guess to some extent this is true. However, it's clearly not completely true. Some people have really weird tastes in food that seem to be biological and seem incredibly unhealthy. I guess the classic example is the kid who won't eat his broccoli, but there are a ton more.

Obviously some of this has to do with the difference between what was necessary to survive during the time when we did most of our evolving and what's necessary to survive now--So, for example we crave lots more fat than we actually need since we're just way less active and able to eat way more often than our ancestors. But, that can't be the whole story.


Anyway, please post yours. And if any of you can explain these things, please do.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

1) Sleep at all. Wouldn't it be an advantage to not have to?

1) Losing muscle if you don't use it. Though I suppose this is just something that's inconvenient now, as we don't need it to survive.

3) This may get me in trouble. Porn. Why is it we like it? It's just because that part of us can't differentiate between a real person and a picture of person. It doesn't realise it isn't the same as the real thing. Surely this is bad?

Also:

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3) Like/Dislike for Certain Foods: It seems like we'd be much healthier if we just craved whatever foods had whatever nutrients we need most, and I guess to some extent this is true. However, it's clearly not completely true. Some people have really weird tastes in food that seem to be biological and seem incredibly unhealthy. I guess the classic example is the kid who won't eat his broccoli, but there are a ton more

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I think this might have sound reasons. For example, if someone only likes meat, they'll get a lot better at finding it than anyone else, which will probably benefit their genes (i.e, they'll [censored] more). Or, what if there's a weird disease that's spread by broccoli? People who don't eat it will survive, so there's more likelyhood their genes will spread. Obviously there'd be a critical number that's important here (i.e, chances of this happening vs. problems of not eating your greens), but I imagine that a small percentage is sustainable in that way, particularly these days.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

1) The ear: Just like your car stereo speakers, what happens when it blows out or gets a hole in it? Permanent Deafaments?

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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I guess the classic example is the kid who won't eat his broccoli

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Just a quick note on this one, I heard from UK panel show QI that the reason that children start off disliking vegetables is because to a young pallet these can taste very bitter. This has evolved as it stops kids munching on potentially poisonous plants. (This was not said by god-like Stephen Fry so it may not be 100% accurate)

Edited to add: Also with the food thing, obviously from an evolutionary point of view the most important thing is survival, at times when food could be scarce we should obviously shovel down as many calories as possible. Now that society's changes have suddenly (on an evolutionary scale) altered our environment we've been left with the archaic desire of high sugar/fat foods.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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1) The ear: When I first learned about the ear in biology, I was amazed out how many steps there are between sound getting into your ear and it registering with your brain. There are these bones with a bunch of cute names and some hairs swaying in some liquid and stuff. It seems to me that we'd be better off with just a membrane thin enough to vibrate and a nerve hooked up to it

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I think this might be an efficiency thing. I imagine we STARTED with a thin membrane with a nerve hooked up to it (eardrum), but I imagine it doesn't work all that well. The other complicated bits are all improvements on the original. The extra problems from the complexity, like bits not working, like it being easier to damage, have to be outweighed by the advantages in improved hearing. This is probably particularly true with language, but the fact that many animals have better hearing than us suggests that it's important for survival in itself.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

Hey Sciolist, I'm not too sure what it's like to be a virgin or a hermit but my mind understands pretty damn well the difference between porn a real naked woman in my bedroom.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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Hey Sciolist, I'm not too sure what it's like to be a virgin or a hermit but my mind understands pretty damn well the difference between porn a real naked woman in my bedroom.

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Your conscious mind, yeh. I bet you get turned on by porn though. Why? What evolutionary purpose does that serve?

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

Good points, sciolost.

I forgot to ask why we have to sleep in the first place. That one really confuses me.

I think the reason we lose muscle if we don't use it is so that our body's not wasting food/oxygen/energy for pumping blood to keep alive a part of the body we're not using.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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I forgot to ask why we have to sleep in the first place. That one really confuses me.

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I'm pretty sure it's down to how our brain works, I have a feeling that animals past a certain point of complexity sleep, whilst ones below don't. This seems a pretty good example of something that could've been designed better if we had the chance... Could be that it's something fundamental, I'm not exactly an expert on this.

On that note: free radicals, or any of those things that make us age and die due to cumulative errors. They only exist because they start affecting you after you can no longer breed, so evolution doesn't cut them out. Aging is another good argument in favour of evolution, not that this is what the thread is about.

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I think the reason we lose muscle if we don't use it is so that our body's not wasting food/oxygen/energy for pumping blood to keep alive a part of the body we're not using.

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Makes sense. Probably something we could do with un-evolving now though, if we assume we'll spend the next few hundred thousand years without having to spend too much of it worrying about where our food comes from.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

Porn didn't exist back then. The only thing in existence back then that resembled porn was the real deal.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

Debilitating pain. I twist my ankle and now it's too painful to run away from the lion chasing me? Thanks evolution, thanks a bunch. We should just have a system of green and red LED's so you can tell where something is wrong on your body.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

as far as the ear is concerned..I just want to point out that you are right in that a thin membrane with a nerve to recieve the signal would allow you to hear...but it wouldn't be nearly as clear as is produced by the anvil, hammer, etc setup...as a matter of fact it is the evolution of the ear is downright dependent on it being true that a "lesser" ear can still function on some level...

if it couldn't, the ear would be irreducibly complex and a creationist's new best friend [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

for some sense of hearing...pretty much anything that that can vibrate will do..whether it be a bone, or a membrane, or hair, etc...if you put a toothpic or pin or something in btween your teeth and press it against a spinning record, you can pick up sound in your teeth and jaw vibrating..I can't remember where I read this, but I think there is evidence that many animals hear from their jaw.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

sleeping has always annoyed me as well...

just think about how much time we waste sleeping..

it's disgusting

someone figuring out a way that we can get whatever sleep gives us in a lot less time, and maybe without sleeping at all, will pretty much be the [censored]

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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Porn didn't exist back then. The only thing in existence back then that resembled porn was the real deal.

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I know... That's the point.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

The ear is an incredibly good example of an organ that combines ridiculous complexity with sturdy solidity. A simple membrane is actually inferior in both categories. I think it's safe to say that a simple membrane would not give anywhere near the same amount of information that our cochlea does to our brain. A simple membrane hooked to a nerve would also be insanely easy to damage beyond repair. Hearing was obviously very important to survival so a sturdy ear that can withstand trauma, infection, environmental exposures, etc is critical.

Inability to sleep at will is sort of dependent on the person. Some of us certainly can do this. I suspect earlier man was able to do this even more easily. I think at least two factors have made it more difficult. (1) electricity - melatonin levels are important in allowing us to go to bed and these get screwy with conflicting messages of whether it is light or not, (2) decrease in physical activity on average - when we were busy chasing rabbits and other animals all day or fighting off the bigger animals, we experienced physical tiredness. Many, many people today simply don't have this sort of physical exertion as a normal part of their life.

Stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense:

1. Trachea starts in a crazy bad place. Why couldn't the opening somehow be higher in the throat, up more in the nasopharynx, so that choking when swallowing isn't an issue?

2. Limited number of eggs for the ladies. Why in the world do women have a limited number of eggs while men have unlimited aquamen? I really don't see any advantage to having a truncated period of fertility. Many asexual organisms don't have this same limitation.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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This isn't a thread about evolution not being a correct theory (sorry stupid people). This is a thread about how evolution's screwed us and various other organisms over. Post examples of various things that evolution's done that you think are stupid, and maybe some other people can clarify why things turned out the way they did.

Here are mine:

1) The ear: When I first learned about the ear...[snip]
1) Inability to sleep at will: ...[snip]
3) Like/Dislike for Certain Foods:...[snip]


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The ability to count...some of us still need work...

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

Hey, what's the deal with adenoids, AMIRITE?

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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Inability to sleep at will is sort of dependent on the person. Some of us certainly can do this. I suspect earlier man was able to do this even more easily. I think at least two factors have made it more difficult. (1) electricity - melatonin levels are important in allowing us to go to bed and these get screwy with conflicting messages of whether it is light or not, (2) decrease in physical activity on average - when we were busy chasing rabbits and other animals all day or fighting off the bigger animals, we experienced physical tiredness. Many, many people today simply don't have this sort of physical exertion as a normal part of their life

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I think the idea was more that you couldn't just sit down and say "ok, let's sleep", no matter what the time of the day, rather than talking about regular sleep patterns.

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2. Limited number of eggs for the ladies. Why in the world do women have a limited number of eggs while men have unlimited aquamen? I really don't see any advantage to having a truncated period of fertility. Many asexual organisms don't have this same limitation.

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It looks a lot like you'll know more about this than me, but does this often cause a problem? As there's a limit amount of time that women can breed (particularly a thousand years ago when average lifespan was under 30), I would have thought this would never be hit, so evolution had no reason to fix it. Presumably fishies are a lot easier to build than eggs?

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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Hey, what's the deal with adenoids, AMIRITE?

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Or the appendix. Does anyone know how creationists explain away the appendix?

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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This isn't a thread about evolution not being a correct theory (sorry stupid people). This is a thread about how evolution's screwed us and various other organisms over. Post examples of various things that evolution's done that you think are stupid, and maybe some other people can clarify why things turned out the way they did.

Here are mine:

1) The ear: When I first learned about the ear...[snip]
1) Inability to sleep at will: ...[snip]
3) Like/Dislike for Certain Foods:...[snip]


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The ability to count...some of us still need work...

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I was rather hoping that everyone would follow my example and also count 1, 1, 3, with nobody commenting on it. You've RUINED my masterplan.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

Also why haven't we grown wings yet?
And with all the people who've died of drowning, our lungs haven't figured out a way to grow some backup gills?

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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Hey, what's the deal with adenoids, AMIRITE?

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Or the appendix. Does anyone know how creationists explain away the appendix?

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They have fossils, logic, common sense, the Grand Canyon, reason, the platypus, physics, and science to deal with, I think the appendix is off their radar.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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Also why haven't we grown wings yet?
And with all the people who've died of drowning, our lungs haven't figured out a way to grow some backup gills?

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Things that haven't happened but we'd like them to is a different idea to things that already happened

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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And with all the people who've died of drowning, our lungs haven't figured out a way to grow some backup gills?

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http://images.digitalmedianet.com/20...terworld-1.jpg

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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1) Inability to sleep at will: I've always thought this really sucked. It seems to me that people would be more productive if they could choose when to sleep. You'd still get tired if you didn't do it often enough, and pass out if you chose to stay up for way longer than you should, but you wouldn't have to lie in bed staring at the ceiling before a big day. It'd be more like going to the bathroom and less like breathing.

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Sleeping at will and a complex, powerful brain don't jive. If your body can't take the time to shut down correctly with your brain on full tilt thinking and dreaming mode, you're going to hurt yourself.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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I guess the classic example is the kid who won't eat his broccoli

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Just a quick note on this one, I heard from UK panel show QI that the reason that children start off disliking vegetables is because to a young pallet these can taste very bitter. This has evolved as it stops kids munching on potentially poisonous plants. (This was not said by god-like Stephen Fry so it may not be 100% accurate)

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I've read the same thing previously. Kids won't eat asparagus, spinach and other bitter plants because it's an evolutionary response to avoid similar-tasting foods that will kill them.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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1) Inability to sleep at will: I've always thought this really sucked. It seems to me that people would be more productive if they could choose when to sleep. You'd still get tired if you didn't do it often enough, and pass out if you chose to stay up for way longer than you should, but you wouldn't have to lie in bed staring at the ceiling before a big day. It'd be more like going to the bathroom and less like breathing.

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Sleeping at will and a complex, powerful brain don't jive. If your body can't take the time to shut down correctly with your brain on full tilt thinking and dreaming mode, you're going to hurt yourself.

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Why? Is sleep important in theory, or just for the way that our brains evolved?

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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Hey, what's the deal with adenoids, AMIRITE?

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Or the appendix. Does anyone know how creationists explain away the appendix?

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God put it there to test their faith

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

[ QUOTE ]
This isn't a thread about evolution not being a correct theory (sorry stupid people). This is a thread about how evolution's screwed us and various other organisms over. Post examples of various things that evolution's done that you think are stupid, and maybe some other people can clarify why things turned out the way they did.

Here are mine:

1) The ear: When I first learned about the ear in biology, I was amazed out how many steps there are between sound getting into your ear and it registering with your brain. There are these bones with a bunch of cute names and some hairs swaying in some liquid and stuff. It seems to me that we'd be better off with just a membrane thin enough to vibrate and a nerve hooked up to it.

1) Inability to sleep at will: I've always thought this really sucked. It seems to me that people would be more productive if they could choose when to sleep. You'd still get tired if you didn't do it often enough, and pass out if you chose to stay up for way longer than you should, but you wouldn't have to lie in bed staring at the ceiling before a big day. It'd be more like going to the bathroom and less like breathing.

3) Like/Dislike for Certain Foods: It seems like we'd be much healthier if we just craved whatever foods had whatever nutrients we need most, and I guess to some extent this is true. However, it's clearly not completely true. Some people have really weird tastes in food that seem to be biological and seem incredibly unhealthy. I guess the classic example is the kid who won't eat his broccoli, but there are a ton more.

Obviously some of this has to do with the difference between what was necessary to survive during the time when we did most of our evolving and what's necessary to survive now--So, for example we crave lots more fat than we actually need since we're just way less active and able to eat way more often than our ancestors. But, that can't be the whole story.


Anyway, please post yours. And if any of you can explain these things, please do.

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I can see where you're going with numbers 2 and 3 but I disagree strongly on number 1. A thin membrane would be too easily destroyed surely. I like the real ear a lot better for being long-lasting.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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Debilitating pain. I twist my ankle and now it's too painful to run away from the lion chasing me? Thanks evolution, thanks a bunch. We should just have a system of green and red LED's so you can tell where something is wrong on your body.

[/ QUOTE ]

adrenaline usually is natures answer to that

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

If you've ever been depressed than you know why evolution made it so you sleep a lot of your life. Some people's lives suck. Think concentration camp or slavery.

i don't think evolution protected our eyes well enough

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Grunching thread to say that for as much of the human body that works so well, they really [censored] up the eyes part.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

what about our mouth not having enough space for all the teeth ):

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the goal of humanity is not to be productive

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At age 10 I had a cyst the size of a golfball grow in a cavity in my neck. The cavity is a evolutionary remnant of gills, required a pretty significant surgery, and has left me with a pretty cool scar on the neck. I believe roughly 1 in 10,000 people develop these cysts, and without surgery they're fatal.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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i don't think evolution protected our eyes well enough

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"As good as possible"? No, which is the point of this thread, but certainly "well enough" simply by definition.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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1) The ear: When I first learned about the ear in biology, I was amazed out how many steps there are between sound getting into your ear and it registering with your brain. There are these bones with a bunch of cute names and some hairs swaying in some liquid and stuff. It seems to me that we'd be better off with just a membrane thin enough to vibrate and a nerve hooked up to it.


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You have to look at the way physical structures evolved - what were the precursors, and what was their function? I know nothing about how the ear evolved, but it is quite possible that those bones were there for some other purpose and then got incorporated into the ear. I believe that's the theory of how wings evolved, that the physical structure started out doing something else and then evolved into the first, very rudimentary, wings and voila - flight!

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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1) Inability to sleep at will: I've always thought this really sucked. It seems to me that people would be more productive if they could choose when to sleep. You'd still get tired if you didn't do it often enough, and pass out if you chose to stay up for way longer than you should, but you wouldn't have to lie in bed staring at the ceiling before a big day. It'd be more like going to the bathroom and less like breathing.

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Sleeping at will and a complex, powerful brain don't jive. If your body can't take the time to shut down correctly with your brain on full tilt thinking and dreaming mode, you're going to hurt yourself.

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So give me the ability to go through the complex process that eventually leads to sleep.

This sort of ties in with the more general concept that we really don't have control over our consciousness. For example, don't think about your knee right now.

Re: *Official* Evolution is Stupid Thread
 

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Grunching thread to say that for as much of the human body that works so well, they really [censored] up the eyes part.

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I think I've heard multiple references to this too (usually in the sense of 'wtf people talk about how the eye means we had a creator, but if so he was a [censored]') but I dont know whats so bad about the eye, enlighten me?