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Comment by npstr | Hacker News Reader

Nature does not refactor. There's the laryngeal nerve somewhere in the neck of mammals that has to go around a blood vessel. On Giraffes, this runs all the way down the neck, around said blood vessel, than back up, all that just to connect two places in the upper neck that are inches apart. Evolution writes the ultimate spaghetti code.

More info: https://berto-meister.blogspot.com/2011/08/unintelligent-des...

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Early developmental biology (by “early” I mean early pregnancy) is the shit you Do Not Touch. Each step of development is highly dependent on the previous steps (assuming this bit’s here, that bit’s there, etc.). If you make a change it’s extremely likely to be fatal or have negative consequences like birth defects, and the likelihood of a bad outcome climbs steeply as you move the change earlier and earlier in the process. That’s why pretty much every animal - humans, tigers, whales, lizards - looks the same when they’re a teeny tiny little fetus.

My example is testicles! Testicles begin in the same place as ovaries, which made a lot of sense back when we were coldblooded! Having a pair of balls dangling in a soft pouch between your legs isn’t a strategy you adopt if you can help it. In the alternate timeline where lizard people rose to dominate the earth instead of humans they don’t have “Ouch, I’ve been hit in the balls!” humor.

But the testicles form next to the kidneys early on in the developmental process (and as we’ve established, you don’t fuck with those stages), so they have to migrate south VERY late in the development! Because they SCHLOOP on down after everything else is pretty much in place, it weakens the abdominal wall, which is why men are more prone to certain types of hernias than women are.

Nature does not refactor, except when it does as in the case of going from 48 to 46 chromosomes (great apes->humans). Nice write-up and slightly novel hypothesis at: https://molecularcytogenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

https://youtu.be/cO1a1Ek-HD0?si=H6X6ICZQLbq_s41C

The famous Richard Dawkins video about that (4min long)

"Octopus throat runs through brain" and the "blood supply in FRONT of the retina cones n rods" were the other 2 that are often mentioned.

Nature hires a million devs and then kills the project if they do not hit a deadline.Nature mixes it up with sex and creatures hunting one another. There are no chill moments.

noodly its appendage, sphagetti its code, in its image we are made, amen.

*ramen

God must be a frontend developer.

Or hacked it all together in Perl: https://xkcd.com/224/

He's definitely full stack.

Nature rarely* refactors. Sometimes random mutations refactors, which leads to efficiencies which leads to evolutionary advantages.

If nature doesn't refactor, then why are there so many crabs?

Clearly refactored for memory safety.

Hence C laws

There are many crabs because of convergent evolution, in this analogy that has nothing to do with refactoring. That is more similar to competing products having a lot of the same features.

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