'the human body is perfect god doesnt make mistakes' what about wisdom teeth then. huh. gonna let those bastards grow in and fuck up your jaw for god. didnt think so
also the exploding appendix
there's an entire book about all the ways the human body is fucked up, but the highlights I remember are:
-The blood vessels for our rods and cones in our eyes don't run behind them but rather in front of them. It's like putting the power cables *over* a camera's lens
-the nasal sinus cavities fucked up during evolution. when our skulls shortened, we went from having a straight shot from one end to the other to having basically a basin which can collect mucus, which then has the actual exit for the chamber at the top of it. this normally isn't a problem bc cillia can work viscous mucus up it, but when we get sick and produce super watery mucus, it no longer works, which is why our noses get stuffed up.
the book is called Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. I recommend it.
Most mammals can’t get scurvy. They make their own Vitamin C. But in primates, the gene to make it is broken. Normally, when an important gene breaks, the organism dies and has no surviving descendants, but when it broke a few million years ago, our ancestors were living in a lush climate with lots of fruit and survived the failure just fine.
Then humans invented fire and clothing, and moved to colder climates where fresh food was only available part of the year, and scurvy was born.
And our reproduction, oh heavens. There are SO MANY WAYS that human reproduction is fucked up that simply DO NOT APPLY to other animals, even the our nearest relatives, the great apes. When a gorilla is giving birth, she finds a nice hiding place in the trees, squats down for like half an hour, and pushes out a baby. Humans, not so much. In fact, the outcomes of unassisted childbirth in humans are so poor that most anthropologists agree that we must have invented midwifery in some form before we became fully human.
