Really, beside the body:brain ratio,and opposable thumbs, there's nothing intelligent with the human body.
First of all, humans aren't durable. They will be crushed at 18 Gs. Their skin is vulnerable to rocks, stones, and when opened it can let bacteria in which can cause severe illnesses. Humans can only survive 3 days without water and 20 days without food.
- Yes, but humans have other far more obvious problems. Take teeth. Many people have more teeth than mouth giving them horrible problems with wisdom teeth. Eyes, are not particularly good - many people need glasses. Then there is the human back - really bad design and very prone to injury. That's because we are a quadruped which has learned to walk upright but we still don't have all the bits fixed. The appendix, male baldness female breast cancer. The human birth system - what a kludge that is. But hey, it can't be that bad - cause we're made in god's image. Which doesn't say a lot for the blueprint really. (Mmmm perhaps this should be in the article.) R Fitzroy 22:50, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
- Yeah... When do you think humans will mutate into a better animal? blah 01:57, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
The thing is that all animals are constantly evolving. There is an assumption that evolution makes things "better" but this is an oversimplification. Evolution will operate to do many things including:
1. Fit the organism to the environment.
2. Maximise the possibility of reproduction.
3. Remove unnecessary of unneeded adaptations.
1. The issues I mention above are all about improving the organism's general fitness in the environment. But as evolution acts over million year (or at lest hundred thousand year) time-scales we're certainly not going to notice anything on human time-scales. It is also possible that our technological advances will have slowed our adaptation in this regard as we now use technology to do this bit of adapting on our behalf.
2. We certainly have scope for evolution in the question of reproduction. One of the ways in which an evolutionary trait can get fixed in a population is by increasing the number of offspring which have this trait. Now that birth control is commonly available we can speculate about what this might mean. Possibilities include:
a) People who take part in more risky sexual activity are more likely to have children. Thus we may see a population more interested in taking risks.
b) People who are more intelligent are more likely to use birth control. To put it another way, less intelligent people are more likely to have more children. Thus we would expect - unless things change - for the human race to become less intelligent.
c) Religious people tend to have more children. There is some evidence that some people are genetically predisposed to be religious. Thus we would expect the human race to become more religious.
All of this is pretty depressing - but it only works if our present society continues unchanged for millions of years to let these things work out, and there is slight possibility of that. I mention them only to point out that evolution does not have to mean "better"
3. I mention the third point only to make another point about "better". think of cave-living fish or island-living birds. In one case they lose their eyes and in the other they lose the ability to fly. They become better adapted to their environment by losing things which we would usually regard as "better".
Sorry to go on at such length, but it's an important point. Cheers. R Fitzroy 17:58, 10 February 2009 (UTC)