Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
nautil.us
nautil.us
When we used to walk on four limbs, our heads would naturally incline to an angle that allows full drainage of the sinus cavity. Now that we walk upright, there's a dead spot in the back of the cavity where mucus and bacteria can pool. This is why if you're experiencing sinus pressure but you haven't reached the stage where nothing in your head is moving if you tip your head forward you can often feel an immediate lessening of pressure.
It's an extremely wasteful exercise.
Most mammals do not need to do it, so there's an existing model for how reproduction can work without the need for ~monthly blood and tissue loss.
There are other, more advanced social theories that go into the role menstruation plays in society, but historically, menstruating monthly has been an advantage, not a disadvantage.
The article is kinda... I dunno. Its solution to the spine problems allegedly caused by walking on two legs is ultimately to go back to walking on four legs. This however... urm... presents its own problems, the solution to which is left as an exercise to the reader.
Build a better human first, then criticize the one that already works...
It had brain as hack at #10.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/05/03/linux-vers...
Spoiler alert: once X-ray crystallography allowed for direct observation, the mapping was found to be a chaotic hodgepodge: some amino acids are coded by only one or two DNA triplets, and some are encoded by several. The only interesting property of the actual coding the book mentioned: the language is such that single-base errors in the triplet for an amino acid tended to result in a triplet that encoded to the same amino acid... For the amino acids involved in the most common cellular processes. In other words, transcription errors tend to not mess up the machinery in ways that are instantly fatal to the cell (because of course!).
I would suggest the digestive system is much more of a hack. But, losing the ability to manufacture vitamin C is both unusual (Just some primates and guinea pigs?) and problematic.
You could move the piping, but you'd still have to reward the action. And if there's reward sensors there, clever animals will figure out how to trigger the reward without the action.
In other words, you can move the sewer but they'd probably just build another playground there.
Shouldn't lead to addiction, and would work as well.
I certainly wouldn't characterize urination as fun in the sense of "hm, how can I make this happen more often?"
I'd wager that's a non-ideal situation. Think about the times you've reached a completely full bladder...not a good position to be in.
So you have a combo. Taking a whiz is pleasurable, so you do it when you can. But if you get over full, you get a nice zap of discomfort to let you know you're in a danger zone.
It's basically how it works right now, no need for messing with positive reinforcement.
Eg. the retina: https://theconversation.com/look-your-eyes-are-wired-backwar...
This feature/bug is absent in cephalids with no corresponding downside.
The human optic nerve structure makes more sense as being an artifact of path dependence and the "local improvement constraint" than it being (more) globally optimal in design space.
Basically, just because we found some mechanism which compensates for the arrangement does not mean that we found the cause for the arrangement. The cause is more likely to be an evolutionary local maximum.
Fast forward 20 years and folks suddenly realize it does play a role in DNA expression.
To this day my favorite MacGyverism is bypassing a fuse by wrapping it with tinfoil.
I used that trick once to see if a vintage Pioneer AV receiver with a spent fusible link was worth keeping. I wrapped the link in a gum wrapper and it worked perfectly.
MacGyver is referenced all the time, to the point where I imagine most people pick it up from context clues, even if they've never seen the original show
part 5: http://macgyverglobal.com/2013/03/20/macgyver-the-real-origi...
While I'm sure there is hackery behind all of these, I don't think humans know enough yet to claim we could do better.
If you were designing the eye from scratch, you'd have the nerves coming out the back like in squid. Then if you wanted something that concentrates the red and green wavelengths, you could put something else in front of the light sensing cells.
You'd end up exactly where you are now, except you'd not have a huge blind spot, and wouldn't have to spend as much brain power compensating for it.
Successful does not imply "no flaws." It's interesting to see this argument brought up in the context of biology. It's frequently applied to software, for example it shows up in basically every discussion of PHP.
They could both be optimal for their respective uses. Humans don't spend a lot of time on the seafloor, and cephalopods don't spend a lot of time in the open air. Certainly there are other tradeoffs to be made as well.
I think not.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend toward refuting IDers by claiming that the very prospect of discerning intelligent from unintelligent signals is "unscientific", which is so wrong that it can only survive by groupthink. E.g. How do you even know it's a voice on the other end of the phone rather than static? How do you know the marks on paper are words rather than accidents?
It's not like they don't know about these problems, or nobody ever told them. They just don't think it disproves their ideas. They're offering an alternative explanation that matches the data, but provides no predictive power. You can't refute that with data, because anything that fails to match results in an alteration of the explanation to match it. All you can do is point out that an explanation with no predictive power is useless.
Intelligent Design is just the God of the Gaps dressed up in scientific-sounding language. It collects the unanswered questions in biology and says, "We do not know how this happened, therefore an intelligence was involved." And of course if you dig deeply enough, "an intelligence" is almost always Yahweh, father of Jesus Christ, although they often try to keep that quiet in order to appear more objective.
There are two basic categories of contradictory facts for ID: there are things like the flaws we're talking about here, which say "this could not be intelligence" and there are direct attacks on the gaps, where unexplained things like the emergence of "irreducibly complex" features are explained naturalistically. Intelligent Design deals with both easily. The former can be dismissed by just saying that the intelligence wasn't involved in that particular bit. Or it can just be ignored, which seems to be the standard reaction. Any resource that discusses evolution will discuss unanswered questions and problems with the theory. Resources for intelligent design, as far as I can find, also discuss unanswered questions and problems with evolution but make no mention of any potential problems with ID. The latter can be dismissed by just moving on and continuing to object to other gaps. Or, as often happens, it can be dismissed by labeling the scientist as an anti-religious bigot.
There is literally no imaginable discovery that could overturn intelligent design. There are many imaginable discoveries that could overturn evolution. That's fundamentally what makes the latter scientific and the former not.
You don't refute ID by showing some sub-optimal function in an animal body plan, firstly because ID doesn't claim everything is optimal. ID implies intentionality, but does not and can not explicit intentions. Anyone can make an object that by all means can not be the product of a natural phenomena, and still someone else being able to tell it's design, could not really tell the purpose of it. And, of course, if function is obvious, there's also a better solution.
Which is why that wasn't the argument. Both French and German cars have evidence of design (non-local improvements over earlier transportation), and both clear and garbled speech through a telephone have evidence of an intelligent agent behind them. In no case did I suggest making the inference that flaw -> not design. Rather, it's "being constrained to one domain of attraction in designspace" that indicates lack of intelligence behind the optimization.
>You don't refute ID by showing some sub-optimal function in an animal body plan, firstly because ID doesn't claim everything is optimal. ID implies intentionality, but does not and can not explicit intentions.
Specific variants of ID claim certain intentions, and the lack of intelligent optimization would refute intelligence being behind that intention. (To the extent that this intention is deliberately vague and kept from having observable implications, it can be rejected as non-scientific on that basis, without having to assert the claim, which I was criticizing, that the whole enterprise is unscientific.)
>Anyone can make an object that by all means can not be the product of a natural phenomena, and still someone else being able to tell it's design, could not really tell the purpose of it.
That just means inferences here (as everywhere else) are imperfect, not that detection of intelligence is impossible or unscientific. You can't know to 100% certainty whether the sound on the telephone is someone speaking to you or just a random coincidence of static, but that doesn't mean you throw up your hands, remain agnostic, and lambaste the ignoramuses who dare to claim they have heuristics for speech recognition.
It almost certainly is intelligent design, because it's intelligent given certain constraints (the existing gene pool in a given generation, and the fact that something working is better than something theoretically better but doesn't actually exist). God iterates using an Agile process.
Epic - Improve test coverage
I'm not too up on all the arguments surrounding intelligent design, I think the biggest issue is that there's no good way to prove / disprove it? In that regard this doesn't really contribute that much then.
What can we say about a designer from just looking at their design? Not much, if we don't understand what their design is for. If we're guessing at intent or guessing at design constraints, there's very little useful we can say, pro or con.
[0] remember Descent? You can still play: http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php
That's the correct term. It's also called "kinetosis" -- it's basically when your eyes and the rest of your body disagree about the way you're moving, and your brain freaks out. (Going back to the "design" question -- we don't know why the brain freaks out, or whether there's a benefit to it, so it's hard to evaluate whether it's actually a good system or not.)
Some people have reported significant improvement by playing with higher resolution, a wider field of view, different textures, or (with VR devices like the Oculus Rift) some sort of persistent viewpoint (like a fake nose).
So it's evolutions fault now that a lot of people are sitting around all day long?
> And to add insult to injury, the width of a woman’s pelvis hasn’t changed for some 200,000 years, keeping our brains from growing larger.
As if increasing something like the pelvis wouldn't have detrimental consequences in other parts of the life.
> A man’s life-giving organs hang vulnerably outside the body.
So where are the statistics that show that this is a problem to begin with? I don't know anybody who got his family jewels ripped off accidentally - technically it could happen of course.
This whole list is ridiculous. The human body is not a buffet where you can take some of this and some of that. It's all interconnected mechanically and physiologically.
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/look-your-eyes...
http://threepanelsoul.com/2010/07/05/on-design-by-committee/
The article included the line "These cusped grinders may have been useful before we learned to cook and process food." which for some reason made me think they were making the same argument.
That they likely don't exist.