I have two wisdom teeth in the upper jaw, an x-ray revealed that I don’t have any in the lower. The dentist told me that wisdom teeth are not needed and eventually they’ll stop appearing in humans, then he told me the fact that I’m missing two means I’m a more evolved human being! Can this be true?
Well, unless having wisdom teeth becomes a handicap in surviving or in passing on progeny, you dentist is wrong.
I highly doubt it. I suppose that the very faintest possible glimmer of a chance exists that you have a mutation causing the lack of lower wisdom teeth, but the selective pressure on it would be almost nonexistent, not to mention the fact that it would quickly become irrelevant in the population at large.
The problem with using the term “more evolved” is that it implies that there is some ultimate goal which you are closer to than others. However, in evolution, there is no preordained destiny – only mutations that are more successful than other for a given environment. You, my friend, are just a mutant. 
Actually being a mutant would explain alot more about me than being highly evolved. 
There was a thread here recently about playing with nitrous oxide.
Maybe your dentist…
Nah. It’s very to convince most of us that we’re somehow superior to others.
Peace,
mangeorge
And you dentist couldn’t be expected to say, “You’re a mutant.” until after you have paid the bill.
Do you have a special mutant power picked out yet? Like being able to eat a double bacon cheeseburger in 15 seconds?
The closest I can get to that is being able to drink a bottle of wine far quicker than i should!
I really, really wish schools would stop portraying evolution as progress and start saying it’s just change. Advantageous change, yes, but there’s no such thing as more evolved or less evolved: Every species is equally suited to its environment, or else it would be extinct. Change either makes an individual less suited, in which case it gets weeded out when that individual has fewer offspring (or fewer that mate successfully); more suited, in which case it becomes more common when that individual’s offspring become more successful; or equally suited, in which case the mutation survives or dies off according to chance. (That’s somewhat idealized and simplified: Mildly disadvantageous traits can survive indefinitely if they don’t really impact reproductive success (colorblindness), traits can be both good and bad (sickle-cell anemia), and good traits can be wiped out immediately by chance.)
The dodo, for example, was perfectly suited to its isolated island home. There was nothing that could eat it, it could find enough food, and it could get laid often enough to make more little idiot-birds. However, being unreasonably brave and completely flightless when confronted with a hungry dog is most unwise, and ground-nesting birds generally dislike the sudden introduction of rodents. The dodo’s environment changed severely in less than a generation, and it went from well-adapted to completely unsuited.
Whenever a dentist tells you something, just remember: a dentist is what you call a doctor who flunked out of med school.
and apologies to any dentists out there… I know your people have suffered much.
You’re an anti-Dentite!
I have no wisdom teeth, and my dentist says I’ll probably never get them. I don’t feel evolved, though…just left out.
Those darn people with their darn teeth…chewing more…grumble…
If your dentist knows so much about natural selection (which he doesn’t apparently), ask him which of his dental hygenists has the most desirable set of traits, and what his wife might think of these findings.
You could also tell him that his offspring are likely to be false prophets as well.
Mother Nature is in the process of reducing the size of the human jaw. That’s why wisdom teeth tend to cause problems in most people. There is just no room for them anymore. Even though most of us still get wisdom teeth, Mother Nature is not finished. Some are born with an even smaller jaw, causing lots of crowding sometimes requiring the removal of another set of molars.
Then, some end up with a normal size jaw and less than the normal complement of molars (my problem). I kept 2 baby molars (the 2nd one on each side on the bottom jaw) well into my teens because I had no permanent teeth beneath them. I never got any wisdom teeth either - top or bottom.
The dentist gave me the same explanation of evolution at work back in the mid 50’s. None of it means that you are a more advanced human - many people do not get lower wisdom teeth because the lower jaw is where Mother Nature has done, and is still doing, most of her work. Unfortunately, she is still getting it wrong a lot of the time, which keeps us paying for our orthodontists’ kids ivy league colleges.
It will probably be many thousands of years before the process stabilizes, if it ever does. We may end up like those little gray men with big skulls due to increased brain capacity and little tiny jaws containing about 20 teeth. 
I wonder what survival or reproductive pressure would cause this.
I think it’s more a case of simple variation in jaw size: some people have smaller jaws, some larger, and some that are juuuust right. But unless there are active selective pressures working to favor those with smaller jaws, all we will see in the future is random shifts via processes like genetic drift.
Once again, this implies that nature is working towards a goal. It isn’t. The only thing that matters is whether a given gene is more or less likely to reproduce. If people with the small-jaw gene (assuming there is such a thing) have more children, then the small-jaw gene will become more common. If the advantage of having a small jaw is big enough, then the large-jaw gene might even be replaced. However, genes neither know about, nor care about what happens ten generations hence. They simple exist. Evolution does not plan ahead for the future. The small-jaw gene may be replaced by another even smaller-jawed gene – but then again, it may not. The ration of people with the small-jaw gene and the large-jaw gene might oscillate back in forth as environmental conditions change, or they may be correlated with some other useful feature that determines their prominence.
Men with smaller jaws have a higher sperm count and are less likely to be circumcised.
Women with smaller jaws are larger breasted and more likely to be fertile.
Small-jawed people are attracted to each other.
There ya go!
I have no wisdom teeth at all - nothing in the jaws in X-Rays. My dentist, in his mid 60’s, told me he’d never seen such a case. But somewhere else I read that this condition occurs in IIRC 2% of the population (these seem contradictory to me). In any case, it’s not common.
The idea that I am more highly evolved is too funny to get serious about. I would accept that my dentition is more highly evolved, but that’s a much milder victory.
“I really, really wish schools would stop portraying evolution as progress and start saying it’s just change. Advantageous change, yes, but there’s no such thing as more evolved or less evolved: Every species is equally suited to its environment, or else it would be extinct.”
OK, I have to nitpick. First of all, why shouldn’t we think of advantageous change as progress? And secondly, it surely isn’t true that every species is equally suited to its environment. Some bacteria living in stable and isolated ecosystems must have had thousands or millions of generations with only slight drift, and would be very close to ideally suited - whereas we humans, for example, would ideally have evolved physiologies much more suited to sedentary and overfed lifestyles than we would have required just 3 generations ago, and so are much less well suited to our environment.
“Well, unless having wisdom teeth becomes a handicap in surviving or in passing on progeny, you dentist is wrong.”
No doubt wisdom teeth are a handicap in surviving or passing on progeny. Apparently, whatever it is that earlobes do is important enough that even not having them is just such a sufficient handicap. All we’re looking for is a slight statistical trend over billions of lives. Now, having four rotten molars sounds like quite a handicap to me, and I think it might just hurt enough to take my mind off sex - that’d be quite a handicap indeed.