I thought this question should get its own thread. I’m looking for examples at things that could be (easily) improved on a human body.
More “generations” of teeth would be cool and feasible. Very rarely this happens naturally.
Perhpas it is best said by the PA Dutch. “We get too soon old and too late smart.”
It seems rather poor engineering design to have the air intake system commingled with the food and water intake system. Granted, there are valves and such to keep things going where they’re supposed to go; even so, about 4,000 people choke to death in the United States every year.
Obviously we need a better mechanism of killing off / controlling / preventing the development of renegade cells (cancer).
The appendix is unecessary, and potentially dangerous if infected.
Eyes that don’t lose their elasticity or deform with age would be nice.
We waste a good bit of energy growing and maintaining useless organs like the apendex.
The retina could be set up the right way around, like it is in molluscs.
I read (I think it was richard dawkins) that the human eye has many design flaws. here’s a link to something that came up on google human eye
The design of the human back could be improved. We tend to get tired just standing in place. The deficiency of the human back is even more pronounced for pregnant women.
There was a whole article on this a couple of years ago in Scientific American.
someone will talk about the eye… at some point. parts of it make good sense, the whole backwards thing is because our eyes get direct sunlight unlike the squid that have a “better desgin”. its not smart, but I can stare at the sun for a while and still retain vision in general, if it was a once and your blind thing we would mostly all go blind in childhood or driveing. parts of the bad design is to make sure the eye lasts on the long term.
This is my biggest gripe re: body design.
Better backs, joints and testicles on the inside would be nice.
hmmm
I am not sure if Humans were built to last that long. I mean…think about it…if every humans approached perfect design, humans would last alot longer. Which would be kinda of a contradiction because we’d wipe each other out for whatever resources we have left.
I think there were meant to be flaws so that there is a balance within us and nature.
I could use a few inches chopped off my old fella. It’s justtoo damn much.
No math coprocessor.
The spine! Many of us get lower-back pain or “slipped discs”. The spine works pretty well in quadrupeds, where it’s mostly horizontal, and is fine under tension while you’re hanging from a tree, but it isn’t quite right for standing up and walking around.
You call your nose, “old fella?” How long has it grown?
The human needs to come with a cold weather variant for those of us who live in Canada.
We should have furry feet to keep them warm, a furry neck so that you don’t need a scarf. Furry hands for mittens.
Also, an enlarged carpel tunnel, because carpel tunnel is somewhat common.
The knee. Although it is a wonder of nature, because it helps us walk erect, it’s also a weak spot. Just ask any athlete. Can we make it bend a little more left and right and not require reconstructive surgery afterwards?
The obvious example is the prostate. The damned thing forms a complete ring around the urethra. There is no need for this. It would work just as well if it sat beside the urethra. But because it surrounds the urethra when the prostate swells it blocks off the plumbing instead of just pushing it to one side, leading to all sorts of problems. No engineer would ever design a system where a component prone to swelling needlessly surrounds a compressible pipe. It’s like placing the thermostat around the fuel line, so that when the temperature rises it neddlessly causes the engine to stall. It’s just really bad design. But evolution works with what it has to work with.
The there is the whole reproductive problem. We have problems giving birth already because we are bipedal. That has caused the pelvis to tilt, which means we give birth by forcing the child though a hole that is at an angle to the direction of travel. That makes the birth canal effectively a lot narrower than in other apes. But just to really make it difficult we developed big brains so that the head is larger than other animals. This is just not a smart move form an engineering point of view. Developing a smaller delivery system and then trying to use it for larger packages. It’s adding insult to injury. But that is what we are stuck with.