Not to be snarky, but isn’t every part of a successful organism an evolutionary marvel? If not, then perhaps a more interesting tale would be to look at the bodily systems that are substandard garbage. I’d probably start with the lower back.
Problem: Warm-bloodedness means the testicles are now too warm to work well.
Hack #1: Hang them on the outside of the body so they can stay cooler.
New problem resulting from first hack: Now they're much easier to damage.
Hack #2: Make them hurt really bad if they get bashed, so the owner takes great care to guard them.
The proper solution would have to make them more temperature-tolerant in the first place.
Interestingly, ovaries didn't go down this road, though there are certainly some suboptimal designs in that whole system as well.
A fixed quantity of viable eggs within prime child bearing years until menopause when women would then perform other roles within the community.
I prefer Stephen Jay Gould's point that lots of evolved subsystems are just kludges and jury-rigged solutions that just happen to work good enough, sort of. ("The Panda's Thumb").
How about this design where you stuff food in the same hole you breathe through?
Seems so unnecessarily dangerous.
I agree, but it hasn't killed enough to evolutionarily matter.
It's not like there's no mitigation in place in the body itself.
Evolution's solution: cough it out
Better solution: don't send food, water, and air down the same pipe in the first place
I mean, no competent engineer would design the plumbing for a building such that the same pipes were used for water and air at different times, right?
"In every final scan we could see a big, full bladder, even though most of the women went to the toilet before they went inside the MRI,” explains Pek with comical astonishment. “We think it might be evolution’s way to force women to urinate after sex. Perhaps our ancestors developed this function to avoid urinary tract infections, but that’s only a hypothesis."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvgkzw/the-story-of-the-dutc...
> All amphibians, reptiles, birds, and a few mammals have this orifice, from which they excrete both urine and feces.
> Mating through the cloaca is known as cloacal copulation, commonly referred to as cloacal kiss.
> The cloacal region is also often associated with a secretory organ, the cloacal gland, which has been implicated in the scent-marking behavior of some reptiles, marsupials, amphibians, and monotremes.
> We have very little idea where anuses come from
This also more accurately describes what the article is about.
(That 13-year-old me read at the time when I stumbled across it in my grandfather's study.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VyH1laOd2M good video on this