packing peanuts, box lifting and a 3rd eye

Factual Questions
1

  1. What are biodegradable packing peanuts made of? Why do they take like stale puffy cheetos? Why do people even taste them? Are they bad for you?

  2. If the human race evolved and suddenly we were born with a third on our forehead, how would it affect our overall ability to see and perceive? What if it was on the back of our head?

  3. If you constantly lift 50lb boxes and develop muscles, why doesn’t the 50lb box seem easier to lift? I realize it remains 50lbs, but what’s the actual amount of exertion of between the strong guy who has been lifting them for 6 years, and the other guy who has been doing it for a week.

2

You would probably get better responses by putting each question in a separate thread, but we’ll just leave this as-is until a moderator says otherwise.

But as for your first question: They taste like Cheetos because they are. Basically, if you make cornstarch puffs and add cheese flavoring, you get Cheetos. If you don’t add the cheese flavoring, you get packing material. They’re non-toxic, but I imagine that they’re less strict about cleanliness and the like when they’re making them, so I wouldn’t eat them on a regular basis.

And as for your second question: First of all, evolution isn’t sudden like that, and things only evolve if they’re selected for. Even if a third eye gave some “advantage” in seeing better, the person would probably be considered a freak, and have a harder time getting members of the opposite sex to mate with him or her, so it’d be a disadvantage, and would be unlikely to be passed on to offspring.

But if we leave evolution out of it, and assume that such a person magically appeared (we’ll also assume that the brain changed in such a way that it could make sense of the extra information). An extra eye in the forehead wouldn’t make much difference: The biggest advantage of two eyes rather than one is that it gives you depth perception, but three eyes would be no better than two for that. If it were in the back of the head, then it’d affect our ability by letting us see behind us, but you probably already figured that out.

3

I don’t know about you, but I find that practice makes lifting 50lb boxes (boxes of computer paper, in my case) quite a lot easier. If I go on vacation for a while, when I come back, I’m sure those boxes have gotten heavier!

Trinopus