Hey people under 30 or so, do you even know who MacGyver is? :)
How do you think we spent our weekend mornings, when our parents where still asleep and A-Team just finished?
Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
11–20 of 99 posts
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#12My favourite flaw is that you can swallow (without problems) pieces that are so large that they can get stuck in your oesophagus further down the line blocking it. You can't even swallow your saliva when that happens.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you really think about it, it's probably unavoidable. You have to reward an organism when it performs necessary functions. Which is why defecation and urination are pleasurable. You could move the piping, but you'd still have to reward the action. And if there's reward sensors there, clever animals will figure out how to trigger the reward without the action. In other words, you can move the sewer but they'd proba…
Interesting. I would have thought "no longer feeling full" would have been reward enough for the behavior to be learned.
We spent most of our energy to feel full, why would we want to not feel full?
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#14I think the biggest flaw is the location of the entertainment center next to sewer system.
If you really think about it, it's probably unavoidable. You have to reward an organism when it performs necessary functions. Which is why defecation and urination are pleasurable. You could move the piping, but you'd still have to reward the action. And if there's reward sensors there, clever animals will figure out how to trigger the reward without the action. In other words, you can move the sewer but they'd proba…
You could also make the "full tank condition" painfull, without making draining it pleasurable.
Shouldn't lead to addiction, and would work as well.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#15There was an article just a few days ago where they found the "backwards" retina has denser cells on the front side which concentrate red and green wavelengths. Seemed a bit fishy to me, but it suggests that we don't that our eyes are not optimal. Some of the other things listed are suspect AFICT because we just don't know all the influences that led to them. Arteries? Those are ancient in origin and reflect a weird…
That's just nature making the best it can of a historical accident.
If you were designing the eye from scratch, you'd have the nerves coming out the back like in squid. Then if you wanted something that concentrates the red and green wavelengths, you could put something else in front of the light sensing cells.
You'd end up exactly where you are now, except you'd not have a huge blind spot, and wouldn't have to spend as much brain power compensating for it.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#16Or maybe these are all just "myths", ie. not still fully understood? Eg. the retina: https://theconversation.com/look-your-eyes-are-wired-backwar...
That seems to address a subtlety about the layers of the retina, unrelated to the (bigger) problem of the optic nerve unnecessarily punching through the retina, leaving a blind spot that can't pick up light.
This feature/bug is absent in cephalids with no corresponding downside.
The human optic nerve structure makes more sense as being an artifact of path dependence and the "local improvement constraint" than it being (more) globally optimal in design space.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#17[deleted]
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#18Or maybe these are all just "myths", ie. not still fully understood? Eg. the retina: https://theconversation.com/look-your-eyes-are-wired-backwar...
Steven Novella, of the Skeptics Guide, responded to that research in a way that made sense to me: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/scientists-propose-incorrect...
Basically, just because we found some mechanism which compensates for the arrangement does not mean that we found the cause for the arrangement. The cause is more likely to be an evolutionary local maximum.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#19Hey people under 30 or so, do you even know who MacGyver is? :)
As a 23 year old: of course! As a kid I used to put seasons of MacGyver on my christmas list.
Though to be honest I think I saw Richard Dean Anderson as Colonel O'Neill long before I saw
him as MacGyver!
To this day my favorite MacGyverism is bypassing a fuse by wrapping it with tinfoil.
I used that trick once to see if a vintage Pioneer AV receiver with a spent fusible link was worth keeping. I wrapped the link in a gum wrapper and it worked perfectly.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#20So, this is the so-called "intelligent design"?
I think not.