
Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions - sergeant3
http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/top-10-design-flaws-in-the-human-body
======
a2tech
My personal favorite poorly designed part of the body is the sinus cavity.

When we used to walk on four limbs, our heads would naturally incline to an
angle that allows full drainage of the sinus cavity. Now that we walk upright,
there's a dead spot in the back of the cavity where mucus and bacteria can
pool. This is why if you're experiencing sinus pressure but you haven't
reached the stage where nothing in your head is moving if you tip your head
forward you can often feel an immediate lessening of pressure.

~~~
chuckcode
Always wondered why after surfing the water didn't drain out of my sinus until
I bent over to pick something up. Thanks for the insight!

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agumonkey
A nice picture of laryngeal nerve 'hack' pushed to 11:
[http://blog.eternalvigilance.me/wp-
content/uploads/2013/04/g...](http://blog.eternalvigilance.me/wp-
content/uploads/2013/04/giraffe-recurrent-laryngeal-nerve.png)

------
ffn
[feature request] What about the inability to selectively serialize memory and
put it into sperm / egg? I mean, I get human long term memory is probably
relatively new and gene serialization is as old as time, but it would be
incredibly helpful if we could serialize even a little bit of our memories and
experiences into our next generation. It would avoid tons of repeat learning
every generation needs to figure out (e.g. don't touch fire, don't lick
electrical sockets, don't shit in your bed, reading, writing, riding a bike,
monads, etc.), and allow us to focus on higher level things like cracking
Navier Stokes or unlocking immortality.

~~~
gohrt
That's called "instinct", and the partial implementation "imprinting".
"Learning" is how we rush the process ahead of evolution

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omnibrain
My 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.

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LordKano
My vote goes to menstruation.

It's an extremely wasteful exercise.

Most mammals do not need to do it, so there's an existing model for how
reproduction can work without the need for ~monthly blood and tissue loss.

~~~
debacle
Most mammals go through some sort of estrous, but only a few menstruate. The
main difference is that humans and some other primates have the capability to
mate and rear young pretty much at any time of the year, which is why the
women are generally always capable of becoming fertilized.

There are other, more advanced social theories that go into the role
menstruation plays in society, but historically, menstruating monthly has been
an advantage, not a disadvantage.

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debacle
Mother Nature is not, and has never been an engineer. Evolution is trial and
error. DNA is spaghetti code of the highest order.

~~~
_yosefk
Erm... "software engineers" are not, and have never been engineers.
Programming is trail and error. Computer code is spaghetti code of the highest
order.

The article is kinda... I dunno. Its solution to the spine problems allegedly
caused by walking on two legs is ultimately to go back to walking on four
legs. This however... urm... presents its own problems, the solution to which
is left as an exercise to the reader.

Build a better human first, then criticize the one that already works...

~~~
Ygg2
I suspect the whole article is a joke.

It had brain as hack at #10.

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Retric
Meandering arteries seems rather questionable. I suspect the existing approach
is safer as the shoulder and elbows can take quite a bit of abuse and internal
bleeding is a very serious issue.

I would suggest the digestive system is much more of a hack. But, losing the
ability to manufacture vitamin C is both unusual (Just some primates and
guinea pigs?) and problematic.

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mariusz79
I think the biggest flaw is the location of the entertainment center next to
sewer system.

~~~
jkyle
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 probably just build another
playground there.

~~~
ajuc
You could also make the "full tank condition" painfull, without making
draining it pleasurable.

Shouldn't lead to addiction, and would work as well.

~~~
jkyle
That would only work if you wanted the organism to always reach a full tank,
or near full tank, before taking the action.

I'd wager that's a non-ideal situation. Think about the times you've reached a
completely full bladder...not a good position to be in.

So you have a combo. Taking a whiz is pleasurable, so you do it when you can.
But if you get over full, you get a nice zap of discomfort to let you know
you're in a danger zone.

~~~
ajuc
you make the pain gradually increase from 0 to 1 for blader filled to 0.8 to
1.0 respectivly, and add automatic safety valve to be sure.

It's basically how it works right now, no need for messing with positive
reinforcement.

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kisstheblade
Or maybe these are all just "myths", ie. not still fully understood?

Eg. the retina: [https://theconversation.com/look-your-eyes-are-wired-
backwar...](https://theconversation.com/look-your-eyes-are-wired-backwards-
heres-why-38319)

~~~
SilasX
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.

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dilap
Hey people under 30 or so, do you even know who MacGyver is? :)

~~~
agumonkey
The birth of that show was surprising :
[http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/11/05/macgyver-the-real-
origi...](http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/11/05/macgyver-the-real-origin-
story/)

~~~
lotharbot
part 2: [http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/12/11/macgyver-the-real-
origi...](http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/12/11/macgyver-the-real-origin-
story-2/) (3 and 4: just click "next" after 2 and 3)

part 5: [http://macgyverglobal.com/2013/03/20/macgyver-the-real-
origi...](http://macgyverglobal.com/2013/03/20/macgyver-the-real-origin-
story-5/)

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phkahler
There 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 balance between flexibility,
getting the blood distributed, and not bleeding to death from injuries.

While I'm sure there is hackery behind all of these, I don't think humans know
enough yet to claim we could do better.

~~~
ghostberry
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.

~~~
dekhn
The blind spot is not huge. It's easily compensated for, and it appears the
mammalian eye has other attributes that make it work well. We just don't have
enough data to understand whether mammalian eyes embedded a major problem that
had to be compensated for, or if this design has attributes that make it
desirable.

~~~
protonfish
Maybe, but either vertebrates or cephalopods have to have sub optimal design.
My money is on the backwards retina being the kludge.

~~~
dekhn
No, neither is required to have a suboptimal design. Why do you think that?
Mammals are quite successful.

~~~
mikeash
They can't both be optimal. The probability that both are exactly equally good
is so remote as to be ignorable.

Successful does not imply "no flaws." It's interesting to see this argument
brought up in the context of biology. It's frequently applied to software, for
example it shows up in basically every discussion of PHP.

~~~
breischl
>>They can't both be optimal.

They could both be optimal for their respective uses. Humans don't spend a lot
of time on the seafloor, and cephalopods don't spend a lot of time in the open
air. Certainly there are other tradeoffs to be made as well.

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raverbashing
So, this is the so-called "intelligent design"?

I think not.

~~~
scarmig
Just to play devil's advocate...

It almost certainly is intelligent design, because it's intelligent given
certain constraints (the existing gene pool in a given generation, and the
fact that something working is better than something theoretically better but
doesn't actually exist). God iterates using an Agile process.

~~~
posnet
Backlog:

Epic - Improve test coverage

~~~
boie0025
Yes, one gigantic integration test (Live/Die) is unhelpful and makes it very
difficult to pinpoint problems. Looking for something beyond "it compiles".

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gdh73
What about the heart or other critical yet non-redundant organs. In the tech
world we try to avoid single points of failure like that.

~~~
jimbokun
Which is why the Gallifreyans engineered a backup, I assume.

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senorito
> This change put tremendous pressure on the lower vertebrae, sticking about
> 80 percent of adults, according to one estimate, with lower back pain.

So it's evolutions fault now that a lot of people are sitting around all day
long?

> And to add insult to injury, the width of a woman’s pelvis hasn’t changed
> for some 200,000 years, keeping our brains from growing larger.

As if increasing something like the pelvis wouldn't have detrimental
consequences in other parts of the life.

> A man’s life-giving organs hang vulnerably outside the body.

So where are the statistics that show that this is a problem to begin with? I
don't know anybody who got his family jewels ripped off accidentally -
technically it could happen of course.

This whole list is ridiculous. The human body is not a buffet where you can
take some of this and some of that. It's all interconnected mechanically and
physiologically.

------
billions
Given enough time, all of the listed problems would evolve to a fix. The
iterative method has made 2 billion cells work in harmony with just a few
kinks. Scrum over waterfall.

~~~
scott_s
No, not necessarily, and I think not particularly likely. Evolution is not
"progress". We are not evolving to some platonic ideal. Much of what is
discussed in this article are local maxima that our ancestors hit many
millions of years ago. Because evolution is not planned, and their is no
fitness function other than continued survival, all species are going to be
filled with such anatomical quirks.

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jdbernard
Wasn't this link about the backwards retina on the front page recently?

[http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/look-your-
eyes...](http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/look-your-eyes-are-
wired-backwards-here-s-why)

------
teddyh
Some describe it as having been “Designed by Committee”:

[http://threepanelsoul.com/2010/07/05/on-design-by-
committee/](http://threepanelsoul.com/2010/07/05/on-design-by-committee/)

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ta87878
I think the teeth/jaw issues are a matter of misuse not flawed design. The
switch from hunter-gatherer diet to modern diet was too fast to blame hill-
climbing evolution errors.

~~~
mikeash
That distinction doesn't make any sense to me. The switch to a modern diet was
ultimately a result of evolution. If evolution gave us the ability to
radically switch diets, but didn't give us the ability to properly deal with
the new diet, then that's an example of evolution producing something flawed.

~~~
ta87878
I disagree that there is no cutoff point for what can be meaningfully blamed
on evolution. Would you say that it is an evolutionary flaw that if we drink
too much alcohol we get cirrhosis of the liver and die?

~~~
mikeash
I would say that it's an evolutionary flaw that many humans _want_ to drink so
much alcohol that they die from it. Just like it's an evolutionary flaw that
we like consuming much more food than is good for us, simply because that part
evolved in a time when it was physically impossible to overeat consistently.

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cafebeen
This seems more like a list of edge cases for things that normally work pretty
well. Why not change the things that contribute to war, overpopulation,
disease, etc?

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rnhmjoj
There is also the mitochondrial DNA which is probably placed in the most
unsafe environment inside the cell.

~~~
mitochondrion
Mitochondrial DNA needs to be in the mitochondria, presumably because of
proximity and/or latency issues. That's why the vast majority of mDNA has
moved to the regular DNA or simply disappeared. The stuff that's left behind
isn't an accident.

~~~
breischl
Well, I suppose you would know better than the rest of us! :)

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bediger4000
What do these 'hacks' indicate about the Intelligent Designer(s) in charge of
human creation? That is, can we, as believers in Intelligent Design, discern
anything about the Deity(ies) who did the design? The obvious question is:
"how many deities did the design? One or more?" After that, you'd move on to
gender, and other indicators. Ultimately, one would hope to be able to have
Scientific Proof of the truth of one or more creation stories, and denial of
all the others. Or am I just dreaming here?

~~~
ceejayoz
> What do these 'hacks' indicate about the Intelligent Designer(s) in charge
> of human creation?

That they likely don't exist.

