It wouldn’t work, I think. Either people would have to have some built in desire to eat the fruit (which eliminates the testing for commitment aspect) or you’d have major population problems because people forgot or never knew why they were supposed to touch the plant. You’d also have people forced to handle the plant. Plus regions that couldn’t support the plant or where disease or drought killed it would mean that the humans there died out*. I suspect the most likely result of such an arrangement would be that humanity either dies out or evolves a way around the plant dependency; it’s too crippling.
*Edit: And then there’s the problem of a bunch of primitive people trying to haul the plant over oceans or across arctic tundra; much of the world wouldn’t get settled until the rise of modern technology, I bet. And wars would be even more destructive since the plants can’t run and hide.
Unfortunately for warm blood creatures it isn’t practical at all (and yes, I’d like to be able to do that too). Any oxygen exchange mechanism like a lung or gill requires a large surface area, and as a result is also a good heat exchange mechanism; and water is of course great for cooling things. Which means a warm blooded creature with gills would die from hypothermia. It’s much the same reason warm blood ocean dwellers tend to have plenty of insulating blubber.
Yes, but the new set of teeth would still be useful because while they didn’t get nearly as many cavities, they used their teeth as tools much more and wore them down that way.
As you point out our ancestors had a different diet from us, one that probably involved a lot more grinding and chewing than ours. It’s possible that their teeth were just as likely to wear our from use than rot from decay but decay would still be an issue - it doesn’t matter if you only eat sweet stuff rarely if you never brush your teeth.
But all of this was completely irrelevant to pre-historical humans. The primary reason that we have such bad teeth now is that they didn’t have to last as long. If you lived to be old enough for your teeth to fall out you could count yourself lucky.
How about fixing our ability to make Vitamin C? We still have the gene, it’s just a bit broken.
Also, the human ankle and knee joints could really use some design improvements. We still bear vestigial fingers on our feet, and while our knees work a lot better for bipedalism than any other ape, they’re fragile and really not good at healing when damaged.
Not necessarily. Average life expectancy in the paleolithic was mid-30s, which was generally higher than most of the neolithic. It’s not until the early 20th century that average life spans reached above 40 in most of the world. Health indicators like tall stature, lack of environmental stress marks in bone growth and dentition, and high pelvic inlet depth show that paleolithic people were probably healthier, on average, than even people living modern industrial countries.
There was high infant and child mortality from disease, predation, and difficult living conditions. Infanticide wasn’t unknown either, though recent reviews of previous studies of modern hunter-gatherers living in marginal areas like deserts and the arctic indicate that the much harsher living conditions in the present than was the norm for most of our history probably made researchers overstate the prevalence of it.
The chance of dying before age 15 or so was pretty high. If you made it that far, you were likely to live to be 50-something or older. Illness, accident, or violence were, in order, the probable common causes of death judging from modern hunter-gatherer groups, with some kind of illness comprising about 70% of deaths. Modern hunter-gatherer groups have decent numbers of 60 and even 70 year olds, though mortality greatly increases after age 65. Post-reproductive life spans are on average 20 years. Here’s a (very long PDF) paper on hunter-gatherer longevity and mortality rates. To get the gist, I suggest hitting the graphs and the conclusion down at the bottom, before the discussion section.
Anyway, some people did live long enough to have gotten the problems we associate with old age, including rotten teeth, but they by and large didn’t. They didn’t get cancer either. And indicated by bone markers, they didn’t commonly have degenerative bone diseases, chronic orthopedic problems, or any of the other probable indicators of inactivity. So they were likely quite active, like the other younger members of their group, right up until death.
Universal joints instead of hinge joints for the elbows would give a useful increase in flexibility. Possibly the same for the knees, but that might come at an unacceptable loss in strength and durability for what are, after all, a more specialized pair of limbs.
Another possibility would be moving and thickening the little finger up a bit and turning it into a second thumb for a better hand.
We can be certain that eliminating violent male aggression would have avoided
many more than 100 million premature deaths in just the 20th century: that is known.
And additional millions were grief-stricken relatives and friends of the dead: that is known.
And additional millions were injured: known, and still other millions impoverished: known.
There is no intellectual content to objecting solely on the basis of an unknown “ripple”.
You have to provide something known which outweights the value of eliminating the effects
of violence. If you cannot provide it then you really do not have a horse in this race.
No it isn’t. There isn’t a great deal of “male violence”; violence committed by men yes, but that’s not because of some innate male evil like you are trying to claim. Women have historically been quite fond of violence. They just preferred to have men do the actual dirty work because men are stronger, more prone to risk taking and it’s traditionally their job; in case you haven’t noticed, these days we have female soldiers. Eliminating “male violence” wouldn’t eliminate war; political ambition, greed, religious hatred, racism, and all the other motives for large scale violence would still exist. Wars don’t happen because of “male violence”; women have never hesitated to instigate wars any more than men have. Eliminating “male violence” would at most eliminate things like barfights and muggings.
How about pretty much every human impulse? If you eliminated all the desires that can lead to violence, you’d have a passive lump that would soon starve to death if a passing animal doesn’t come along and eat them first. Violence exists because it’s an obvious solution towards getting what you want, not because Men Are Evil.
It’s kind of amusing to imagine the reaction a gender switched version of your post would have gotten; something claiming that “women are all liars” or “women are all greedy”.
I am quite willing to expand the modification to include women. However,
I believe violent impulses are innate, are evil, and that men are several times
more prone to them than women. it is known that men have led and soldiered
much more violence of all forms than women. Much more. You really gotta problem with that?
Oh? Men are just puppets manipulated by women? Sure. Now tell us how this
ridiculous notion of yours explains relative violent crime rates throughout the
world, and do not omit the violent crime of forcible rape, which is >99% male perp,
and perhaps 90% female victim, prison populations aside.
The impulse to self-preservation is dinstinct from the impulse to violent
aggression. It is not necessary to be a homicidal maniac to want want to
defend your country against the real homicidal maniacs.
I do not believe the factors you name would lead to violence absent a generalized
genetic penchant for violence.
Addressed.
Bullshit.
“The impulse to self-preservation is dinstinct from the impulse to violent
aggression.” Ditto the impulse to satisfy the need for food.
Why would it be amusing?
There is in any case no evidence that women are less truthful or greedier than men.
The FBI has a bit of evidence for what I have suggested, though, and so do the
history books, none of which you seem to be at all familiar with. History and stuff
like that weren’t required courses where you went to school?
Don’t despair: it is never too late for you to learn!
Women as warmongers, huh. From Elizabeth I to Margaret Thatcher, either women who became national leaders had to adapt themselves to a male-dominated political/military system, or else had to have personal qualities that suited them for that system; they had to be perceived as tough and aggressive to be taken seriously at their jobs. Of course they made war. When have women leaders ever had a chance to lead nations without this expectation to demonstrate belligerence equal to the male norm?
The present day. I think of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, who has been leading her war-torn country to peace and rebuilding. Or Malalai Joya who has been a lonely voice struggling against the domination of Afghanistan by warlords and the culture of violence they perpetuate. They are doing everything they can to bring peace. For the first time in recorded history, women are able to rule based on priorities set by women instead of the military-elite-dominated system. Elizabeth I and Thatcher never had that opportunity. (The United States is more heavily militarized than ever and is lagging behind while other countries make progress in this regard.) Women as violently aggressive as men? No, I’m not buying it.
Ah the Straw Man fallacy: attributing to an opponent a position
which he has not taken…
I never said or implied that women were so innocent of violence
as to be in some way “idealised”. I do say that men are much more
prone to violence than women, and the numbers are certainly on
my side. At least the FBI and other sources tell us so. I wish there
were not so many people who think of an insipid little one-line wisecrack
as a legitimate debate tactic.
Instead of playing with an intangible like aggression, or playing around with the whole body and metabolic rates, why not a sex-specific equalizer that we know exists in nature and in primitive mammals? Lets make females venomous. The make Platypus is equipped with a venomous spur, and others have a venomous bite CITE. A combination of small modifications to existing structures would be sufficient to produce a female who is able to defend herself against an ill intentioned male. This ought to even out the breeding cycle as well, for females would only breed when they are ready to.
Generally speaking, night vision, stronger, more useful fingernails, replaceable teeth, and a prehensile tail able to be used as a tripod similar to macropods.
End gestation and single-sex conception. Babies should come from very sturdy eggs that can be produced by either species. But there should still be epic pain involved in passing one, just to discourage overpopulation.
I think if this happened then many other undesirable social traits would weed themselves out naturally and quickly.
There would be no reason to have sexes then. That might be going a bit too far; it would eliminate a huge portion of our interactions, social structure, everything.
Without the modification, at least some humans survived to today, with it, we might have become extinct. Even with atomic weapons and threat-elimination strategies, it is very hard to kill each and every human.
I think there might be some benefit to making humans more alturistic and empathic, but brute removal of ‘aggression’ as Der Trihs said is too risky.
I think the best kinds of modifications are onces that wouldn’t be devestating if they didn’t work out, as mutant humans would eventually help us evolve away with flaw. For example, the backwards toe.
I’d be careful messing with our ability to run (backwards pointing toe, stabilizing tail). At least one popular theory says we survived by running down our food (which also implies that redesign of the knee might be a bad idea (although I’d think it should be possible to make it more sturdy without changing the biomechanics of it)).
The foot as it exists is actually a pretty good bit of engineering, if running barefoot on a somewhat forgiving surface.
In general, I’d think changing things 50,000 years ago to make life better now is going to be damn tricky (c.f. A Sound of Thunder).
I’m not certain that a tail would significantly change the way we run. Prehensile tails would add some weight to the back, but probably be carried curled when in motion. It merely needs to be strong enough to help support us when we want to lean back a bit.