Interesting question from a visitor to the site:
Apparently the comedian Dara O’Briain said something like “If the theory of evolution is really true and we’ve undergone millions of years of evolution, why do we still sometimes bite the inside of our mouths?” Perhaps this could be one of the silly questions answered on your site.
Think about this for a second. It is undoubtedly painful and annoying to accidentally nip the inside of your cheek while, slightly over-enthusiastically, munching on a piece of delicious steak. However, you would have to be pretty unfortunate to die of such an injury. And that’s the problem with evolution – it deals in the currency of life and death, not degrees of irritation. So, if some particular trait or ability doesn’t kill you and/or make you infinitely less/more attractive to the opposite sex, good old evolution is pretty much going to ignore it.
I often hear people talk of how, in several million years, humans will have evolved to all be 6 foot tall, or blonde and beautiful, or to have one eye in the middle of their forehead as we no longer need two. But these folk are missing one vital point, and that point is the male nipple. Let’s face it guys, there really is no purpose to your little chest appendages. But they are still there, right? That’s because evolution really has no interest in removing something that does you absolutely no harm – it’s really got better things to do. Just so long as you survive long enough to have babies, evolution is perfectly happy. You can bite the hell out of your mouth or be in possession of pointless nipples or have a massive nose, and, just so long as you can find one person out of 6.5 billion who is willing to procreate with you, then evolution just isn’t going to take the blindest bit of notice of whatever physical defect you possess.
This is one of my favourite arguments against that whole creationist nonsense. Surely if someone was going to design a human, they would have made us, sort of, better? I mean, wisdom teeth? I can’t talk for the rest of the planet, but I can say that my own cause me no end of pain and annoyance. And what about child birth – surely no other animal finds the whole experience quite as dangerous and traumatic as a human? Could it be that evolution has selected for those physical traits that, while allowing us to walk upright and have big brains (i.e. massive baby heads), also result in lots of women finding their pelvises not really all that great during the process of giving birth? In the toss up between being able to run around on two legs and pain-free childbirth, evolution obviously found the ability to walk on two legs more useful to the survival of the human race, and the ‘wonder’ of childbirth was the trade-off.
A perfect human wouldn’t bite the inside of their lips, experience difficulty in giving birth without help, possess pointless male nipples, endure chronic back pain or develop impacted wisdom teeth. But we’re not perfect. All those little annoyances we have to put up with simply because we’re human are the product of all those years of evolution choosing the traits that help us survive long enough to have healthy kids and ignoring everything else.
