The one thing I miss most: earlids.
I vote for making fertility be under your voluntary control.
I also think it sucks that when you’re weakened by hunger and/or your blood sugar drops, your brain responds with feelings of nausea. This could be fixed, I’m sure.
Some of the issues mentioned here are the result of us not living in the environment our bodies were designed for.
[QUOTE=Simplicio]
A lot of poor eyesite is due to modern technological developments
[/QUOTE]
Ours aren’t exercised enough to function properly without correction. They’re designed to be constantly on the lookout for predators, prey, and sustenance.
[QUOTE=Really not all that Bright]
Well, that’s not really suboptimal design. Knees and backs are designed to last for a normal human lifespan; it’s not their fault we’re all living longer.
[/QUOTE]
Bingo. Human bodies are designed for a lifespan of about 50 years. We’re too damn smart for our own good that we live closer to a century now. Give it another 20 or 30 millenia and we’ll adapt to the current standards.
[QUOTE=Derr Trihs]
Our bodies and brains are not built to deal with surfeit.
[/QUOTE]
We didn’t evolve in a system with a surplus of sugars, so our bodies adapted to store what it didn’t immediately need. Worked great then, but it’s a problem now.
The positioning of the clitoris in regards to intercourse for most women?
Would be worth figuring out if any alternatives are worth trying.
Otara
That was my first thought (as someone who tends to choke while eating!).
That’s another good one. If you’re someone who has no interest in having kids, just flush the whole works - done and done.
Ass crack hair.
I think fertility was not under voluntary control because there were a lot more people who didn’t want to reproduce. Even when natural selection tries to weed them/us out, we/they still exist.
(I’d just say we, but I sometimes feel the biological pull.)
Along the reproductive lines: periods. Would it be better to, say, go into heat once a year for a week and have to be locked into a padded room if you don’t want to reproduce, then to deal with that uterine-lining-flushing crap throughout the year?
-Said a PCOSer who only has to deal with it a few times a year. Don’t see how you regular women put up with it.
I think you are both missing the point. Evolution “designed” things to work well long enough for us to reproduce effectively. The design was spot-on from that standpoint. But the design is surely suboptimal in that it is not an ideal solution. A design (from the ground-up) might deteriorate less into old age, be less prone to various problems and pains, etc.
You win the thread.
Not at all. First, the timescale of having had vision correction of any sort is WAY too short to have any sort of evolutionary effects.
Second, most people have decent enough vision until their mid-late 20s to have been a successful hunter or gatherer and spawned another generation of hunters and gatherers with middling eyesight.
If everyone starts living longer, then the eyesight issues seem to be a major flaw, but when most everything is intended to work long enough for you to have children, it’s not surprising that stuff starts working worse as time goes on past that point.
How many people have high cholesterol or blood pressure at 22? How many have Type 2 diabetes? Even overweight, sedentary 22 year olds rarely get those problems until later in life. Same thing goes with eyesight.
Actually, they should be permanent.
Vetebrates are a patchwork of bone, nerves, and organs originally meant for a watery existence and were then jerry rigged to make life on land possible. You’d have to get rid of everything and start from scratch because none of it makes any sense. Even as something mundane as hiccuping is a vestigial behavior from our amphibian ancestors.
Testicles being on the outside is a pretty good feature actually, since you can touch them (another fact of male sexuality to make women jealous.) On the downside, they can be touched. :eek: But I think we can let that one slide.
The penis is just dangling out there, unprotected. Lots of other mammals have it retract into a protective sheathe.
The way the spermatic cord is set up means that males can get hernias through the hole in the muscle wall.
The clitoris is terribly placed. Female sexual response is dire in comparison to males. Also menstrual cramps and many other related phenomenon.
Women have unnecessarily huge sacs of flesh and fat hanging from their chests. They should be flat like the rest of the great apes.
The tailbone is unnecessary, ditto the appendix, the goosebump response, wisdom teeth, muscles to control ear movement…
We can’t regenerate lost organs or appendages. The immune system attacks the body it resides in. We’re allergic to mundane substances for no good reason. We come pre-packaged with logical fallacies and biases.
We can’t make vitamin C like most other animals. Our senses of smell and sight suck. Our eyes are wired backwards. Our teeth don’t grow back. Our feet, knees, and back are disasters waiting to happen. The recurrent laryngeal nerve dips down into the thorax for no reason. Veins and ducts are going in all sorts of crazy directions. When you open a body up you don’t think how elegant the design is – you think wow! What a catastrofuck.
Anatomist or serial killer - only the internet knows for sure.
The regeneration capability of the Central Nervous System. Or lack thereof.
That goes for the sensory organs, too. I could tolerate limbs not growing back a lot better if at least spines and eyes did. (Enhanced nerve regeneration might make it easier to just replace lost limbs with controllable prosthetics, as well. And after a point it’s not so much a “prosthetic” as “sweet upgrade.”)
So, you’re a guy. You wake up in the morning. Your bladder’s full. Gotta go.
But there’s Something Happening that makes emptying the bladder awkward. And the Something Happening won’t go away until the bladder is voided.
Morning Catch-22.