alt Hacker NewsYou're making the mistake of thinking of "nature" and "evolution" as intelligent, reasoning systems, and that every evolutionary adaptation exists for a purpose. Evolution doesn't do things for "reasons," things just happen.
Remember that cephalopod brains are donut shaped and their digestive tracts go right through the middle and if they eat something too big they'll have an anyeurism. Pandas and koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose and both would be extinct if humans didn't find them cute. Sloths have to climb down from trees to take a shit. Female hyenas give birth through a pseudopenis that often ruptures and kils them. Horses can't vomit and if they swallow something toxic, their stomach ruptures. Also their hooves and ankles are extremely weak and not well designed to support their weight. Numerous species like the fiddler crab and peacock have evolved sexual displays that are actively harmful to their survival.
And as for humans, our spines are not well adapted for walking upright, our retinas are wired backwards, and we still have a useless appendix and wisdom teeth. The recurrent laryngeal nerve has an unnecessarily long and complex route branching off the vagus and travelling around the aorta before running back up to the larynx.
Evolution is not smart. Evolution isn't even stupid. It isn't trying to keep you alive and it isn't even capable of caring if you die. Yes we should absolutely fuck with it, because we don't want to live in a world where we still die of sepsis and parasites and plagues because "we don't want to mess with evolution."
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>koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose
Koalas biggest problem is us? Like they seem perfectly adapted to their niche. Eat lots of leaves that nobody else is adapted to use as food, and once a year, run very fast to outpace the bushfire that your principle food source needs to reproduce.
>we still have a useless appendix
This was believed in the 20th century, but we now believe the appendix is actually useful, and is basically a fail-safe in case the intestinal flora are wiped out; some will survive in the appendix and repopulate the intestine.
Huh, that's really interesting. But I suppose it doesn't apply to the amber alert thing. In that situation, evolution probably was an intelligent reasoning system that existed for a purpose and we must be subverting it (a bad idea). There's always an exception to every rule, I suppose.
Yes, there’s a misconception that evolution leads to optimization and efficiency. It really just leads to traits that are “good enough”.