Blond, short-sighted, tormented by toothache, prone to rheumatism … How many mistakes did Mother Nature make when creating Homo sapiens?
It is believed that a person is at the highest stage of development. He is the embodiment of the triumph of the evolution of earthly life, a creature that is vastly superior in complexity to all other living beings. There is one human organ, the efficiency of which is really enormous - the brain. He is large and powerful, and therefore, probably should balance the many physical disabilities of a person.
Much of what distinguishes a person does not coincide with the interpretation of "natural selection". For example, we have hair on our head, and the main body is hairless, and we have to protect the body from the sun and cold. Why do we have different hair colors? Why do many northern peoples have red or blond hair?
In blondes, scientists believe that blonde hair is primarily the result of "intersex selection." This means that men find blondes more attractive, which is why women succumb to adaptive pressure in the course of evolution and change their hair color to lighter. You can agree with this hypothesis if, say, you read dating ads in which men indicate the desired hair color of their partner.
For example, four out of ten American women have bleached hair. They do this, first of all, in order to please the opposite sex.
Why do men prefer blondes? Beautiful, attractive details of appearance in nature, as a rule, indicate the biological effectiveness of an individual. Why are men obsessed with the correct facial features of women, large breasts and wide hips? Because they testify to good heredity and high fertility! But these signs have nothing to do with hair color, and blond women have absolutely no biological advantages over brunettes and brown-haired women.
Male weakness for blondes is biologically meaningless. An intelligence test was once conducted in which men dated blondes. It turned out that the latter can not only turn the heads of men, but also deprive them of their working capacity!
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The mystery is the "obsessive tenacity" of nature, which continues to give birth to red people. Red hair is the product of a mutation in the MCP-1 gene, which invariably produces a colorless skin type that reacts strongly to sunlight. From a biological point of view, it does not provide any advantages, and in the era of growing ozone holes, it even becomes a serious disadvantage.
Despite the fact that the number of white-skinned and red-haired people in the world is only 2%, there is no need to talk about a decrease in this share.
The explanation using intersex selection does not work in this case, since the appearance of a red-haired woman, and even more so a red-haired man, is far from always found attractive. Moreover, the "fire-haired" are considered to be too hot-tempered. This is nothing more than a prejudice, but it is enough to significantly reduce the chances of this type in finding a partner. And sexual adaptive pressure does not have the slightest effect on the genetics of redheads of humanity.
Scientists have found that redheads feel less pain than others. From an evolutionary point of view, this can only be an advantage: resistance to pain is needed not only during a fight, illness or in accidents - a woman's suffering during childbirth is also alleviated. But why did nature give this quality exclusively to redheads?
A person has a sense of smell, hearing and other senses. But his balance is less developed than that of monkeys and cats climbing trees. With taste, Homo sapiens has gone further, because as an omnivore he has an extremely varied menu. About 10 thousand taste buds that help in choosing a particular dish are located on his palate and tongue - this is much more than in dogs (1700) and cats (about 500). The receptors are in the form of papillae, but not all of them are precisely gustatory determinants: some of them serve to distinguish tactile stimuli and determine the consistency of the food product, which is important for the gustatory impression in general.
A person receives about 80% of information through optical perception - he trusts mainly his eyes. The mechanism of converting light rays into a signal that, thanks to the work of the brain, is transformed into visual images, no doubt deserves respect. No wonder Charles Darwin said: "The thought of the eye excites the whole body."
This mechanism is so complex that it could hardly have arisen as a result of spontaneous mutations - here the theory of evolution was in doubt. But today Darwin could have been calm. Firstly, the eye device clearly demonstrates a lot of trial and error of evolution, and secondly, this mechanism still remains imperfect.
The retina of our eye is designed "incorrectly": during embryonic development, it has nothing to do with the central nervous system. The visual cells inside the skull are close enough to the surface, but still they remain deeper than they should. As a result, light must pass through the cornea and various nerves and blood vessels before it hits the sensitive optic cells.
Of course, this affects the quality of our vision. In much more primitive creatures - bristly worms - this process looks much simpler: their light hits the layer of sensitive cells directly, and for them this is a serious advantage.
A person can distinguish quite a few colors of the spectrum and all kinds of their combinations. Moreover, it distinguishes colors very well. Mice and dogs have no idea what red is, whales and seals generally lack the ability to recognize colors, since blue predominates in their habitat.
Colors are colors, but human visual acuity is sensitive to interference. One in four Europeans suffers from myopia, because their eyeballs begin to function less well with age. But thanks to the human strength of the spirit, this can be experienced. It has been reliably established that short-sighted people have intellectual indicators four points higher than farsighted people. They even conclude that IQ and myopia depend on the same genes.
The fact of the presence of myopia in humans already suggests that they are genetically imperfect, if we compare chimpanzees, whose evolutionary path 6 million years ago separated from ours. Scientists have compared 14 thousand genes of humans and monkeys. As a result, it was concluded that in chimpanzees, with the help of incessant selection, 233 genes have improved so much that no mutation could improve them, and in humans there are only 154 such perfect genes. Chimpanzees have been culling unfavorable traits more efficiently throughout evolution than in humans.
Taking into account the genetic superiority of apes, it becomes clear why they are less susceptible to disease than we are. In humans, one in five dies from cancer, in chimpanzees - 2-4%. What about AIDS? Monkeys are not familiar with this disease, despite the fact that they can be HIV-infected, like humans. Their immune systems have apparently found a way to counter the mysterious viruses.
Also, monkeys do not have Alzheimer's disease, malaria and rheumatism at all.
A pronounced predisposition of a person to joint diseases is the result of upright walking. It, of course, gives us many advantages: thanks to upright posture, the human brain and sense organs have developed, and he has acquired much broader prospects. Let us recall another important distinguishing feature of a person - his hands, with the help of which the main part of human activity is performed. The list of traits that distinguish humans from other animals is quite extensive!
It should be noted, however, that bipedal walking is extremely slow, energy intensive and inefficient. All tetrapods that have reached the size of a man are faster and more enduring than he. It takes a lot of effort or clever tricks to throw them off balance, while the average person needs one push.
Blood circulation in an upright position is also a big problem. Sometimes, standing up suddenly, a person experiences dizziness, because his blood at this moment does not deliver enough oxygen to the brain. Whether something like this happens in mammals that are predominantly upright is unknown. However, giraffes also definitely have circulation problems due to their long necks.
Human lungs are also not perfect. A particular problem with the human respiratory organ is that it wastes some of its potential. Air gets inside, is held for some time for gas exchange, and then exhaled. Moreover, oxygen is not completely absorbed by the lungs, and a mixture of oxygenated and depleted air occurs in the respiratory tract.
As a result, our pulmonary vesicles have to be content with such mixed air. Other mammals experience a similar problem - unlike birds, which make better use of oxygenated air. Their body can receive during an equal period of time three times more clean air than a mammal of the same size.
Mosquitoes are the most dangerous animals on Earth for humans. Carrying over a hundred fatal diseases (including malaria, yellow fever and encephalitis), they kill up to 3 million people every year.
The list of human shortcomings can be continued, if not indefinitely, then quite long. Why, for example, do we have to suffer with teeth, in the core of which there is a very sensitive nerve that acutely perceives pain? And our teeth are covered with such delicate enamel that it can be damaged even by candy? And why, in fact, are we so susceptible to pain? The terrible suffering of cancer patients brings torment to those close to them.
Why can't we be insensitive to pain, like a small underground rodent with the funny name "naked mole rat" - after all, he will not feel pain, even if he burns his smooth skin in the sun or breaks a tooth digging in the ground, and calmly continues to do his business? Why has evolution deprived us of a small paradise in which these same diggers live?
For all that, we have an organ that we have always considered useless and in case of its disease we removed it without regret. But not so long ago, scientists discovered that the cecum is a reservoir for intestinal microorganisms that can hold out there even during the most severe diarrhea.
If our intestinal flora is damaged after diarrhea or exposure to antibiotics, it can be restored again thanks to the presence of this reservoir. For her, the appendix plays an important role, being a repository of probiotics - living microorganisms that have a healing effect on the human body.
Well, one wise man noticed that mistakes arise not only because people do not know the truth, but also because people undertake to condemn what they do not yet know.
Yet from an anatomical point of view, a person is arranged rather poorly. He has no fur to protect him from the cold. He's not fast or strong enough. It takes a woman a lot of time and effort to give birth to offspring. And after birth, it is so weak that it cannot run or feed on its own.
It is not for nothing that Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) defined a person as "a being full of flaws." To be able to survive, a person needs his own environment adapted to his needs, partly replacing the real world for him: clothes, heated houses, mechanical vehicles, roads, etc.
We are quite capable of creating this, because Homo sapiens have a huge brain, which requires 20% of the total amount of oxygen inhaled for its work. But is a huge brain really good luck for us and for the world? What kind of artificial "second nature" could it be? Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), being impressed by the events of the Second World War, said that the insidiousness of the brain and consciousness consists in "making people more and more beasts."
Intellectuals doubt that the next natural species will emerge after man at all. Man can in no way be the crown of creation, but after him a more perfect creature will hardly appear, because with his thirst for power over nature he destroys everything that is necessary for the appearance of this creature.
German anthropologist Helmut Plessner (1892-1985) called human history "negative naturalism." The development of the cerebral cortex of a person's brain is a mistake due to which a person has gone out of his natural rut and life balance. Man “has become a victim of the parasitic development of one organ,” writes Plessner. - Parasitism of the brain, possibly based on disorders of secretion, endowed him with intelligence, insight, knowledge and awareness of the world. Perhaps this awareness is just a grandiose illusion, a self-deception of a biologically degenerate brain of a living being sucked out by polyps."
If you further develop the idea of a "pest" in your head, you need to pay attention to the fact that the human brain formed incredibly quickly. In relation to other similar dramatic changes in evolution, he became what he is now, in a "second". So to speak, a quantum transition in the history of development. It took whale about a million years to transform from a clumsy land dweller into an excellent fountain specialist, while it took a man only ten thousand years to inflate his brain to the desired size and performance. The pace is breathtaking. In any case, the question arises: should brain development be considered a healthy phenomenon or an evolutionary error? Development at a fast pace often leads to errors!
But there is no reason to be discouraged. Thinking of the brain as a “parasite in the head” does not mean the end of the world. Scientists are confident that even the AIDS virus has developed a tendency towards self-control in recent years and leaves its victims alone. Not because he had mercy. But simply because he "understood", having gone through the cruel school of evolution and selection, that the death of his master would simultaneously mean his end.
So it's in his best interest to keep us alive. Why not realize this to the "main parasite" living in our head? Can't he understand that it is better for him to let us govern ourselves and insist less on the mandatory implementation of our claims to power?
Of course, you shouldn't let the "brain cleaning" take its course. The virus is quite primitive, and it can count on the fact that someday, after various mistakes and dead ends, evolution will show it the path to survival. The brain cannot know this. As an organ with more or less desires, it cannot expect favors from nature. He wants and must take the initiative into his own hands.
The first step would be to realize that everything that lives has a right to it, regardless of whether it is perfectly created by evolution or at random. Madness can be possessed not only by man, but also by nature itself!
Sergey Minakov. From the book "Mysterious Phenomena of Nature and the Universe".