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Comment by nayroclade | Hacker News Reader

When I read about something like this, my first thought is always, is this something we could have evolved ourselves? And if so, what haven’t we? Thicker mucus seems like something we have evolved, so was there some survival trade-off, perhaps in terms of general quality of respiration, that meant we didn’t?

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I forgot what scientist said this but “survival of the fittest” is a misnomer and it’s more about straight up surviving. You need to have tolerable constant pressure for evolutionary traits to propagate. Also, its very possible we already developed thicker mucus than our ancestors millenniums ago.

It is not so long ago since we are exposed to so many different viruses. I think way to less time for evolution to be effective.

Our ancestors a few thousand years ago still lived in largely isolated, at least not as extremely mobile and transcontinental communities as we do. And in terms of the number of generations, that is so few that we can say we are at the very beginning of an evolutionary development .

61 million years ago, a branch of the mammalian family tree had a gene break, called GLO. Since then, those mammals have been unable to synthesize Vitamin C. That branch includes humans.

There's no upside to this. Vitamin C is crucial, it isn't especially easy to get sometimes, and it would most definitely improve survival. We just... can't make it. That's all.

"There's no upside to this."

Of course there is an upside to this.

We may not value that upside and we may not ever learn what it is but ALL traits have both benefits and costs.

While I doubt that’s true in general, I could fantasise that this somehow, in a roundabout way, contributed to our intelligence because it may have increased selection for better vision, pattern matching etc. to gather (edible) fruit.

Evolution isn't nearly as perfect as you think it may be.

For an example, check your feet.

I’m looking at them, they’re nice.. be more specific?

Yeah, our legs and feet provide a pretty sweet and effective kinetic chain. What's not to love.

They start to hurt around year fifty.

Hard to blame evolution for that given that reproduction is much rarer after age 50.

It's a lot easier to take care of your grandchildren if you can move without pain, but I thought the whole point of this conversation was arguments as to why evolution is not as perfect as one might think.

For most of human evolution, wouldn’t 50 be incredibly old to become a grandparent?

Routing the plantar nerve around a bunch of ligaments that swell with use seems like a pretty horrible idea, for one!

I can imagine this (and thicker mucus in general) negatively affecting olfaction, which is pretty important for survival.

We have lots of defenses. Unfortunately viruses evolve a lot faster than we do.

And our immune systems evolved before we had airplanes.

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