I wonder why the human body is so badly designed?

[LJ17xx]

However the human race came about, why are we so unprepared for life? Our bodies aren't equipped. So many illnesses, mental health disorders, too many ways to die!

I think we have messed with evolution, so we are doing things which our bodies have not evolved to do. In recent history, we have started keeping lots of people alive with modern medicine and food production; we are messing with natural selection, with our natural habitat, and with evolution itself. Of course we have lots of additional problems.

You cannot mess with evolution - it does not give a shit!

But I agree, we don't use our bodies appropriately. Or how we need or want to use them has changed faster than evolution can keep up with.

But we are a very adaptable species, taking over the world, living longer than our forebears...

But yes, there are quite a few design faults...

Ive recently been diagnosed with a chronic illness and have thought this many many times. It's causing me quite a lot of pain but I'm hoping that I'm able to get that under control and then maybe I'll see the funny side...

The one thing I don't get is that pain is supposed to signal something is wrong. Brilliant. But you're body is like a phone that beeps when you get a text and then just constantly beeps after that text until you've deleted it or whatever. I wish bodies could realise that they don't constantly need to tell us something is wrong, we know. We're trying to deal with it 😞

Also joked that I was more evolved than a friend not so long ago cause they had four wisdom teeth but I only have three...

I wish bodies could realise that they don't constantly need to tell us something is wrong, we know. We're trying to deal with it 😞

Sorry to hear you’re suffering. Pain has to be constant or you’d just forget it - and there are people who genetically feel no pain. They have an absolutely terrible time and damage themselves horribly due to it.

It does suck- I get you. Chronic pain is bloody awful. I hope you get some treatment and relief.

PerfectlyDone My scientific knowledge is certainly very sketchy, so I am sure you are right. However, it does seem to me that we can mess with evolution, because we can keep people with chronic health problems alive so that they can reproduce and pass down their genetic tendency to infertility/ addiction/ coeliac disease/ etc.

clara, no, you are of course right.

We are interfering with 'natural' selection, but to not do that would be a terrible throw-back and invites conversations about eugenics which is just too horrible for words. Not saying that that is what you were advocating, I am agreeing with you.

Most chronic diseases first manifest at an older age (after 30) by which time someone has already passed down their genes if they followed natural "wild human" sexual behaviour (ie, sexual activity from about age 12-14, and no contraception).

I read the Egyptians had average lifespan of about 32 & still had a thriving society and no trouble reproducing fast enough.

We aren’t interfering with evolution because evolution doesn’t have a purpose or a direction. This is our environment now and we will adapt and change to it.

I get what you’re saying though, which I think is more that our environment has changed massively in a short time - too short for us to substantially adapt to many things and so our previous adaptations are no longer as beneficial. That’s certainly true

Things like coeliac, addiction etc are unpleasant but if they don’t prevent or reduce reproductive success then they don’t have the same pressure on them to be ‘bred out.’ There’s also the fact that some potentially deleterious mutations may also have positive effects. So two copies of the sickle cell gene will give you sickle cell disease which is bad news, but one copy will give you sickle cell trait and a resistance to malaria - so it’s spread. There’s a thought that Cystic fibrosis in the heterozygous (one copy of the mutation) may have or in the past have had a similar protective effect against something - one theory is the Black Death.

Also many of gear mutations arise sporadically - so (if one was being a eugenic dictator) if we wiped out everyone with disease x, then the mutation may well just arise anyway again. It’s not always an unbroken chain of passed down errors.

I read a really interesting article a while back about modern medicine and how it is preventing evolution from happening in the way it once did. Take c-sections for example. Women with small hips, or very large babies presenting a head/pelvis mismatch would have likely died in childbirth before the days of medical intervention. Now however, it is highly unlikely that you will die during childbirth if you are in the Western World. The same goes for genetic issues that are passed down through families, illnesses such as cancer that are hereditary etc etc. Of course you are more likely to die from these but you also stand a good chance of not dying. Because we are being treated, and successfully treated when illness gets in the way, we are passing down those illnesses to our family members who are also being successfully treated and passing them on to their future family members. We have essentially, more-or-less, stopped evolving. The human body is incredible, I don't doubt that. Modern medicine has stalled natural selection significantly however. This has resulted in higher rates of illnesses such as the ones you mentioned than that which we would've seen had modern medicine not been a 'thing'.

We are also living much longer than we are 'designed' to as we prolong life through medical intervention. Other species do not do this, and they are still evolving in a way which requires natural selection.

All very interesting. Thank god for our NHS hey!

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/evolution/10297124/Sir-David-Attenborough-Humans-have-stopped-evolving.html

A few years old but interesting nonetheless!

Hmm, I see what you are saying. I think it comes down to adaptability. The human race has been so successful because of it. We can live over a huge spectrum of climates and altitudes. However, the rate at which we have advanced (mainly in terms of industry and technology) has surpassed our evolutionary capabilities.

I studied psychology and learnt about the 'stress' process on the body. It is designed to release cortisol when threatened, adrenaline to run and then has it's own system for fat-storing to ensure we can keep running/fighting/hiding for survival.

But now, we release cortisol, adrenaline and kick start our chemical fat-store and nothing happens. Because our stresses are related to unnatural environments, such as work loads and monogomy (stress at work/within relationships). Humans aren't meant to deal with these things and it requires mental strength.

Add social conditioning in to confuse your hippocampus and you get depression, anxiety and weighgain to name a few things. All of which lead to stroke, heart attack, diabetes and so on.

Cancers (naturally occurring) go back millennia though. A body in the Natural History Museum has a hole in the skull from a brain tumour that is believed to have been the cause of death.

I think it's a marvel. All the functions and processes it gets on with. We inflict terribly on the body to cause the problems in most cases.

@ificouldwritealettertome of course. It's not necessarily a bad thing that we have stopped evolving. We just don't need to anymore. When I say we aren't evolving, this is in regards to classical evolution and the theory of natural selection. We are progressing in many different ways however (culturally, through technology, intelligence etc etc). I don't think we can claim that our advancements have surpassed our evolutionary capabilities however. It's our incredible evolutionary capabilities that have allowed for us to advance so spectacularly.

In regards to the 'fight or flight' response you're referring to (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) you're right in that it has changed significantly. This is due to our surroundings and changes in stressors as you demonstrated in your post. Of course our fight or flight response is different. Look at our ancestors. They were faced with acute, dangerous stressors on a day to day basis. We quite frankly aren't. I don't know anybody who can say they face a life-or-death situation on a weekly basis. Our stress comes from every day things which are often quite trivial. We live in a much less heightened, but much more constant haze of fight or flight and it does contribute to mental health illness, high blood pressure, heart problems, weight gain etc etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by social conditioning 'confusing' the hippocampus, however it was a couple of years back when I completed my psych PhD so maybe I missed that one!

And you're right about cancers going back millennia, however I would be willing to place money on the fact that the person which that still belonged to was not in their 70s!