Rubystreak sorry to hear it. I know it fucking sucks big time to have physical ailments that are chronic. I don’t know why I’ve been “blessed” other than I have always HAD to be strong for others in my life. My dad has heart disease and chronic back problems (he was run over by a bulldozer)…mom’s fighting cancer and is diabetic…My wife had Muscular Dystrophy and my daughter has it also. I’ve buried at least a dozen family members in the last 3 years.
So I can understand where you’re coming from. People have said to me many times that I’d suffer when I get old. I’m 42 now and I have put my body through hell. It’s nothing to work 16 hour days then get home to work some more…I’m talking hard work too. I’ll grab a couple of crossties and throw 'em up on a shoulder and carry 'em like that all day. Last summer I shoveled 20 TONS of gravel one week with a shovel and wheelbarrow on a yard I was landscaping. I might be climbing a ladder all day with bundles of shingles this week and pouring concrete next week. matter of fact I’ve got two jobs to pour next month. They are both over a hundred yards and I’ll probably wind up doing them by myself. I can’t explain it, I’ve just always been healthy. I’ve been shot, stabbed, wrecked and flipped vehicles…in fights, you name it man…it’s happened to me. I’ve had probably a thousand stitches at least. It’s very strange.
Actually, we were doing comparably well until we started using our big brains to think up ways of ‘improving’ the birthing process, like having a bunch of people poke and prod the mother with hands that had just been poking and prodding people dying of a variety of infectious diseases, and wrapping the mothers in towels, blankets and sheets that had previously been wrapping those same dying, infectious folk. Once we hit on that idea, deaths from “childbed fever” skyrocketed. Mortality rates from childbirth probably never got higher than 10%, but that’s still pretty damn high for something you were expected to go through several times in your life. However, once we figured the advanced technique of “wash your hands, dummy” things got a lot safer again.
For anybody who believes that humans are a fucked-up design, I present The Life Cycle of the Sheep Liver Fluke! Or how about the Chinese liver fluke, which needs to go from someone’s bile duct through a snail and into a fish before you can be infected. THAT’S half-assed!
Some of you are missing the bigger picture. Consider the design as a whole. Even if you have bad knees, back, neck, feet, chances are you can still REPRODUCE – because we’re smart. Because we have big brains.
I have pretty bad knees. I still think they’re a pretty excellent design. Little shock-absorbers, awesome ligaments that are totally strong, totally flexible, that allow movement in so many directions, and only snap under the most extreme circumstances. That, while allowing us to run, jump, swim, bend, twist, do the hokey and the pokey. There is NOTHING man makes that is like those devices.
Can’t get on board with this, Lumpy. The human body has been selected through evolution to give us good chances of survival. It’s not designed to help people pass anatomy class.
I’m no great student of physiology, but those 10 muscles probably give us some redundancy in case some go bad. They are packed into a small area, and help give us comfortable motion up down, left, right. With your back, you can twist, bend forward, bend backward, bend to either side, hold your head up for long periods of time. Try to design a machine with that range of motion and that kind of durability.
it’s exactly those things you think are terrible that make it so nice.
That is a good way to describe it. Everything works just well enough that we can reproduce and get the little bastards started on their lives. After that there’s no point, evolutionwise, so we start falling apart like mayflies. But that collapse can be predicted because of the “just good enough” design. Anyone surviving beyond the point where his children can get by on their own is a drain on resources.
And that design was arrived at haphazardly, which really shows in the final product. If a revision didn’t kill you, at least not too quickly, it got passed along. And as revisions are introduced with a whimsy and lack of foresight that would make any marketing department proud there are many opportunities for one to cause a catastrophic structural failure. This is reflected in the high number of spontaneous abortions, most of which occur before the mother is sure she is pregnant. We are each a house of cards and it doesn’t take much for the structure to collapse.
Actually, eyes and ears don’t truly have duplicates. Without a second eye, you wouldn’t have depth perception. Without a second ear, you wouldn’t be able to orient the direction of a sound.
Heh, thanks. I may ask friend to try that, but I doubt it’ll work. It’s not pain what I feel, it’s just…erm… too sensitive to touch (extreme sensation). It’s bad because my neck is still tense, and I can feel that, despite the other feelings.
I can’t argue with any of that. But it doesn’t change my basic point that an upright pelvis and a huge head (mother and child respectively) has made childbirth a hazzard for humans that it simply isn’t for our fellow mammals.
t/k
