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Quirks of Human Anatomy

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Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy

#101

Post by tsoukase »

jgalt212 wrote: post #86
tsoukase wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. I didn't know that. Prostate in Greek means Protector and took its name from it's role. Ages ago this function was known.

Your statement implies the ancient Greeks discovered the functionality and named this organ.

No, I was wrong. Medical history says that it was discovered in the 16th c and initially was named Parastate, meaning a "helper" gland. Later the name changed by chance to Prostate and stays revevant as it was later found that it's role is also protective.

Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy

#104

Post by volemo »

wincy wrote: post #84
Grom_PE wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just bring back opposable thumbs on feet.

I don’t know about you but when I’m hanging around at home I pick things up with my toes all the time. My mom taught me how. My wife thinks I’m crazy.

Are you perchance hanging by your long and nimble tail when you do so? :D

Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy

#105

Post by odyssey7 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #65
odyssey7 wrote: post #28

Part of this reads like a shortlist of things that doctors and scientists don’t know enough about yet. If you’re looking for a PhD topic, here are some ideas.

I strongly disagree. Literally every item in there makes perfect sense if you have an understanding of how evolution works. E.g. many of these items are simply vestigial in some sense, where their presence doesn't actively harm the species and it doesn't impose any substantial energy budget. E.g. the current top comment here is about male nipples. Male nipples may be "useless", but they're not actively harmful (and t…

How do you prove a negative, that something is vestigial?

An unfortunate habit of medical messaging is to assert that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If you haven’t studied a phenomenon well enough, you simply assume that it doesn’t exist or is not important.

Some people will say that this is important, because the public needs simplified messages. That viewpoint is misguided and denies patients autonomy by denying them the information needed to weigh matters themselves. It rightly causes many to view the advice they receive with suspicion toward an untrustworthy salesman who is either ignorant or intentionally misleading.

Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy

#106

Post by 47282847 »

cogman10 wrote: post #95
47282847 wrote: post #88

> The process would be safer (and less painful) if the path mimicked a caesarean section, with the baby exiting through the navel. Prenatal development research posits that natural birth is a required “early training experience” and that a lack or disruption of that collaboration between mother, environment and (already conscious) baby during pregnancy and during birth (like cesarean) may result in various psychologi…

I'm sorry, first link is from an organization dedicated to this fringe theory. Second link is pretty dated and I wonder if more recent studies back this finding.

Chen, H., & Tan, D. (2019). Cesarean section or natural childbirth? Cesarean birth may damage your health. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 351. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00351

Orovou, E., Antoniou, E., Zervas, I., & Sarantaki, A. (2025). Prevalence and correlates of postpartum PTSD following emergency cesarean sections: Implications for perinatal mental health care: A systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Psychology, 13, Article 26. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-025-02344-5

Shen, X.-Y., Wang, J., Zhang, W.-N., Zhao, M., Ju, J., Li, X.-Y., Lu, Q., Wang, B., & Zou, L.-P. (2021). Cesarean section due to social factors affects children’s psychology and behavior: A retrospective cohort study. Frontiers in Pediatrics, 8, Article 586957. https://doi.org/10.3389/fped.2020.586957

Hemminki, E. (1991). Long term maternal health effects of caesarean section. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 45(1), 24–28. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech.45.1.24

Handbook of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology: Integrating Research and Practice Editors: Klaus Evertz, Ludwig Janus, Rupert Linder https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41716-1 Publisher Springer Cham 2020

Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy

#107

Post by tempaccountabcd »

krzat wrote: post #12
rasse wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say just this. Another interesting one is the auricular tubercle[1], where the genetic trait of a "pointy" ear found in other mammals reappears in some humans. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_tubercle

Cool, maybe we could make CRISPR elves?

[dead]

Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy

#108

Post by ahalay-mahalay »

glenstein wrote: post #35
ahalay-mahalay wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s interesting about that is that brain doesn’t actually give you much access to the sensor information directly, but gives an interpretation instead. There is a thing called Saccadic Suppression that blocks visual data processing for 50ms when eyes are moving, and the brain just backfills that missing data from the “next frame”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

Thanks, I had not heard of that one. As a recovering philosophy bro I love cataloging all of these peculiar artifacts of our visual experience. They turn out to matter quite a bit in some of the endless mind versus brain and mind versus matter debates. Off the top of my head: - Blind spot where the optic nerve exits the eye - Saccadic Suppression (new to me!) - Panum's fusional area (how close the overlapping images…

If you like this kind of stuff, check out sci-fi books by Peter Watts, at least read the epilogue of the Blindsight book which mentions saccades and other ways the brain can be tricked.

Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy

#109

Post by polotics »

volemo wrote: post #14
xg15 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read this does have a functional reason: Sperm cells have to be kept at slightly lower temperature than the body temperature, so if the testicles were inside the body, the sperm wouldn't survive. Of course you could ask why sperm is so temperature sensitive in the first place...

If elephants did it, I’m sure we can too.

If we were as large as elephants, then yes.
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