Yeah, humans have evolved so that 1) a large brain (head) is a good thing. 2) A baby with a large head would either be damaging to the mother, or cause her to have large hips leading to lower survival. 3) So instead a baby can be born small, and grow over 18+/- years. This means that the infants are more helpless than other species, but it’s a tradeoff. We have the best conceivable situation now.
:smack: Yeah, and that’s the biggest reason. You’d see tons of noise.
Heh. sees what he did there
Could we make newborn skulls squishier, or would that cause too much damage to the brain? What if less cerebral cortex developed before birth? Cats and dogs have small babies whose eyes aren’t even open. Surely we could let that whole “vision” function thing wait a day or three…
I like the idea of making the digestive system work less efficiently once the needed caloric intake is approached. Even better if you could somehow consciously “opt out” of the digestion process entirely, so you could, say, eat a slice of cheesecake and get nothing out of it. I imagine it as being something like holding your breath: choosing to override a normally-automated process, but something you can only do for short periods of time, getting more and more uncomfortable.
Along with this, I’d separate the breathing and food intake areas, too much opportunity for choking.
Vision does wait, in a sense. They only see blurs, and it isn’t until six months or so that an approximation of their vision looks like it can resolve anything useful to us. By a year it’s mostly normal. I understand some other research has shown that babies can see better than this as we previously thought, but I’m not sure how that’s going.
WRT to calories, efficient storing is very useful if you expect to be in famine times. Now that we have McDonald’s, it’s less useful. Any method that gets the best of both worlds would be nice, as suggested.
I think there’s significant trade-off. Sure, we could separate by say making the nose and mouth separate, but then we either give up speech or we have several duplicate organs that serve similar purposes. I think that’s a lot of why we ended up where we are now, that its more efficient to have them combined to some extent. I do think that we probably could do with a bit of improvement in minimizing choking, but that’s more a bit of tweaking than anything.
Some improvements I’d like to see would be more along adjustments of our instincts to the modern world. For instance, it’s difficult for many people to turn away fatty and salty and sweet foods because we instinctively find them delicious since they used to be more scarce. Maybe we could adjust our tastes toward more healthy foods and have our hunger reflex be a much better approximation of our actual needs. Like if we’ve had an excess of calories we will be less hungry in general and, when we are, we’d have cravings much more in line with what we really need.
I like the idea of some redesign of some joints and muscles as well. For instance, the knees could probably be made quite a bit simpler and sturdier. It’d be nice if we could get an equivalent for other senses to closing our eyes. Tons of times I’d love to be able to have less noise around, to focus or sleep, and the only way to do it is to use ear plugs or just try to ignore it. Ditto for some smells and tastes. It could be dangerous for pain, but there’s plenty of times I’d like to be able to turn off a headache or a sore muscle since the pain isn’t really serving a purpose of making me aware anymore.
If there are going to be genetically engineered humans, they’re most likely going to live in developed countries. This kind of project is going to be expensive, and it’s unlikely that anybody will spend that kind of bank on people who are going to live in the Third World. If you did want to spend a lot of money to improve the lives of Third World people, you could make things better for the non-genetically-engineered people who are already there by spending it on things like malaria prevention, preventing childhood diseases, providing access to basic medical care, and sanitation. The genetically engineered humans are going to be living in the developed world. They’re going to need things like ways to avoid obesity, heart disease, and cancer, not ways to deal with situations where there isn’t enough food.
It would be a lot harder to engineer a human to be perfectly adapted to any environment where humans could possibly live than it would be to engineer a human to deal successfully with a particular environment. The obesity epidemic we have now may be a result of people being optimized (by evolution, in this case) for an environment where there are food shortages. Those optimizations work against us in an environment where there is too much food easily available.
Human fetuses have their eyes fused shut until somewhere around 28 weeks of pregnancy (I’m at 28 weeks now, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately). Babies born then or even earlier can survive. One of the biggest hurdles to their survival is that their lungs aren’t developed enough to breathe. Could we speed up the development of the lungs, so it happens earlier in gestation? We can do this to some extent with steroid drugs. Humans produce related steroid hormones, so the thought of this happening earlier doesn’t seem totally crazy.
If that happened, and the brain could develop first in the areas needed for things like breathing and suckling, with stuff like vision coming later, babies could be born earlier. That would make the birth easier on the mother, since the baby would be smaller.
That’s a really good one.
As long as we’re making a wish list I want wings (alngel like - not insecty), and superhuman strength.
But then it would just be human strength.
Avian style uniflow lungs would greatly improve our breathing efficiency over the current dead-end design we share with other mammals. It might also make it easier to clear mucus and less prone to pneumonia. Oh and bio-luminescence. Put the flash light manufacturers right out of business we would.
How about eliminating the appendix and the wisdom teeth for starters? Also, do something about the tendency of the gall bladder and kidney to form stones?
Regarding pregnancy – The location of the uterus is just fine, if you go on four legs. It just kinda hangs down there. For a biped, not so much. The pressing up against every other internal organ is darn annoying.
Also, sinus drainage needs an overhaul. The drainage ports are also located just fine for the four-legged. For bipeds, not so, but at the top of the sinus cavity, leading to annoyance and misery for lots of us.
Double or triple redundancy on vital organs such as the heart and liver. Also can we not run the urethra through the prostate for men?
Yes! It would be so much better if it didn’t impinge on the space used by the lungs and the bladder.
Let’s make the ear more durable. Noise-induced hearing loss is common, let’s make it a lot less common.
Let’s have teeth that are continuously replaced, like sharks do, rather than one set of teeth that is supposed to last from around age 7 until death.
One nice idea I’ve come across is the respirocyte. Basically, it’s an engineered red blood cell that stores highly pressurized oxygen. A managable quantity in the bloodstream could allow you to hold your breath for hours at a time. They require nanotechnology, but only that of a fairly basic kind, and could probably be built today if we had a molecular-precision “printer”.
The trouble with any biological device is that it is a tradeoff.
Sometimes, it is due to old and abandoned traits, like the comments how some of our configuration is due to what worked for 4-legged configuration.
however, a lot of trade-offs are just that - the brain, for example, requires a huge amount of energy - so we had better make good use of it. You want fast running? You have to lose pounds elsewhere- less brain, less upper body muscles and thinner bones, less digestive capacity, etc. You want strength? Say goodbye to speed. Rest muscle requires more calories just to maintain, so you better not find yourself in a famine situation - those scrawny weaklings will be able to knock you over the head and stuff you into the cookpot after a week… Good night vision or IR? Don’t expect good daylight vision unless you come with a grey filter second eyelid.
Extra orfices for separated breating and eating, means extra places to get infected; note how easy it is to get sinus infections. Good ability to fight infections could mean more sensitivity to allegens and more autoimmune diseases, if your immune system decides to attack the wrong thing, but very efficiently.
(There’s the joke that “God must be an engineer, because only an engineer would put a sewer outlet so close to a recreation area…”)
The tradeoff for IR vision is worse than that. It’s not going to work very well if you’re warm-blooded. Particularly not if your eyes are near your brain, which is putting out a lot of heat. We need elaborate cooling systems for IR telescopes.
Another problem is, IR, except for a few frequencies, is absorbed by water vapor and carbon dioxide in the air. IR vision isn’t going to do you a whole lot of good in most situations if the air you need to live absorbs it. The same problem happens for UV and anything higher in energy.
The tapetum lucidum does reduce visual acuity, in animals that have it. They get better vision in low light as a tradeoff. But humans living in the developed world don’t really need good vision in the dark. We’ve solved that problem with things like fire and electric lights.
This. And take the bloody NERVES out of them, as well. If they’re constantly being replaced, there’s no reason for the super-sensitive, worst-pain-in-the-world nerves running through the center.
If we could go back to fundamental biochemistry, there’s got to be tons of things that are arbitrary features left over from how life developed. For example, iirc every cell in our bodies spends 40% of it’s energy running a sodium pump that maintains our cells’ electrolyte balance; there’s got to be a better way. Or there’s got to be a stronger and better substance to build our bones out of than calcium phosphate. Without changing any gross anatomical features a reengineered vertebrate could probably be 2-3 times as strong and use half as much energy as what random evolution gave us.
Oooh! Oooh! Can we get nictitating membranes, just for the sheer helluvit?
