
Evolution’s Worst Mistake? How About External Testicles? - YeGoblynQueenne
https://undark.org/article/wilo-lents-human-errors/
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bambax
If you want to talk about external testicles in mammals you should mention
elephants. Did you ever see an elephant ball sack? Yes? Then you're a liar,
'cause they don't have one.

Elephants have internal testicles, which seems proof enough that any
utilitarian explanation about why it's necessary or useful is flawed. Many, or
most evolution features are just accidents. Anything that "kind of works" is
good enough for evolution.

Truest part of the article:

> _Far too often we repeat refrains like “Well, it must do something important
> or natural selection would have eliminated it,” or “Living things are
> perfectly suited for their habitats,” or “Evolution doesn’t tolerate
> inefficiency.” We haven’t really moved on from the creationist mindset that
> expects to see perfection in nature._

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tribune
External testicles are interesting because they do seem like pretty terrible
"design" by evolution. However, as any man can tell you, the pain associated
with getting hit in these all-important reproductive organs is so severe that
he will go to great lengths to avoid it and protect them. This makes sense
evolutionarily: men protect their fragile but crucial external organs. It's a
lesson they only have to learn once!

Also interestingly, it seems that sperm really needs to be cool to operate
well. Some of the first advice fertility doctors will give to a man is to wear
loose underwear, i.e. let the testicles hang and stay cooler than the rest of
your body. Apparently none of our ancestors had success making sperm at body
temperature, so we're stuck with these external organs that are optimized to
stay cool at the price of being vulnerable.

~~~
gxs
Definitely appreciate that you put design in quotes - we aren't really
designed in the way that most people think about the word.

My understanding is more like things are tried until something sticks. Maybe
internal testicles would have been optimal, but external ones were first and
simply good enough to stick around.

~~~
hprotagonist
to make a bad CS analogy, imagine 4.5 billion years of grad student code. Each
generation does juuust enough work to graduate, makes liberal use of chicken
wire and duct tape, JB weld if you're lucky. Source control is for suckers.
Mutation is a great design pattern. Globals are obviously the best. Goto is
fine. Dependency management is for lesser beings. The code was hard to write,
so it should be hard to read. There are no comments and if there were they
would lie.

~~~
jobigoud
And meta programming. Lots of meta programming.

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vinayms
I'll leave the technicalities to the better informed posters and post some
related thoughts.

Whenever I watch lions on one of the nature channels, I think a male lion
looks so majestic and powerful front on but looks as ugly and vulnerable from
the back due to its testicles sticking out. When male lions fight, I get this
skin crawling fear of lions ending up with torn testicles. Instinctively I cup
my own like football players in the wall do.

That said, I think on bipedal animals like humans (but not stooped over
primates), external testicles are not only relatively safer, they are also
aesthetically good. I mean, imagine a penis sticking out of the abdomen
without the testicles like a hook nose. Picture the famous Greek naked statues
this way and you shall see how odd and ugly it would have been. (One might
argue that humans might have been conditioned to consider this rather cropped
anatomy aesthetic but that's a debate not worth having.) I often wonder if
this external pair of testicles is analogous to a pair of breasts, acting like
a natural jewellery that attracts mates.

There are several 'feature wish list' I have for humans. Such as. Similar to
eyelids, having earlids would have helped against loud noise but I guess noise
pollution was not rampant during humonoid 1.0. Same with noselids. I would
have loved to have regenerating cartilage, at least, if not regenerating
organs (liver is a bit odd but not fully so), but I guess humans didn't live
long enough to have lifestyle issues due to joint wear and tear. As for
external testicles, if not the way things are, the entire unit, including
penis, should have been retractable into a pouch but I guess there weren't
pool tables during ver 1.0.

This sentence form the article is gold.

> We are evolved to survive and reproduce, but not necessarily to be healthy,
> comfortable, or happy

~~~
bhnmmhmd
> We are evolved to survive and reproduce, but not necessarily to be healthy,
> comfortable, or happy

This. Unless, we interfere with the fcking evolution and make necessary
alterations ourselves.

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endergen
Ha. Compared to evolution's treatment of human female reproduction, you have
to be kidding. Giving birth is extremely dangerous and painful. Being pregnant
itself takes 9 months and generally to have one only one child who takes 20
years (in modern culture, younger naturally) to be independent. Compare this
to other mammals such as dogs/cats, who are pregnant for shorter, have
multiple children, they mature within a year, and birth is way more
effortless.

~~~
carb
The author doesn't actually think this is the worst mistake evolution made.
The articles in this series elaborate on ideas that _didn 't_ make it into a
final book. The author has some gripes with external testicles, but didn't
find them important enough or interesting enough to fit the discussion about
them into his book, Human Errors.

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crooked-v
The breathing hole and the eating hole being connected is pretty bad, too.

~~~
mbreese
Why? A good part of how something tastes is actually based on the smell. And I
f you want to avoid a food that was poisonous, you want as much input as
possible. How better to manage that than by forcing air though the same
passageway that has the food?

So even if it increases the risk for choking, you reduce the risk for eating
something hazardous.

At least, that’s one possible explanation.

~~~
gowld
A better way would be to put your nasal receptors in the mouth, separate from
breathing.

~~~
mchahn
Have you ever watched a cat walk up to something and smell it? They purse
their lips to use the smell receptors in their mouth.

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hprotagonist
To call any evolutionary adaptation a mistake is to assert a natural teleology
of evolution (which is being violated in this case by dangling testicles).

Usually, this makes biologists uneasy.

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hackeraccount
I understand it's for a laugh but finding proof in the existence or non-
existence for the the super natural in nature has always seemed dissatisfying
to me.

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mbfg
It's not like evolution evolves towards the ideal, it just evolves away from
the deadly. So unless you can show where external testicles will cause a group
of people to die off, there's no reason to believe it should have been
absorbed into the body. Plus for the species to continue, you don't really
need that many males, anyway, so sub-optimal oddities involving men's bodies
are likely to be more prevalent as it won't likely kill-off the species.

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cesarb
The initial part of this article sounded a bit handwavy to me: "Evolution
could have simply tweaked the parameters of sperm development so the ideal
temperature of its enzymatic and cellular processes was the same as the rest
of the body’s processes. [...] The fact is that there is no good reason that
sperm development has to work best at lower temperatures."

Do we understand enough of the sperm development process to be able to affirm
that a higher temperature variant of the process could work better, and that
the only reason for the lower temperature one to have won is path dependence?

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lurquer
External testicles in domesticated animals are essential. Easy to snip off.
Ever tried ploughing a field with oxen that haven't been gelded? Not fun. It's
also a very convenient way to manage the breeding of livestock, ensuring some
control of who breeds with whom.

(It's also convenient to have external easy-to-remove testicles when one
wishes to form certain choirs.)

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nyc111
I'm always puzzled why similar topics always end up as a fight between so-
called scientists who advocate evolution; and religious folk who believe in an
"intelligent designer." The thing is, the "intelligent designer" doesn't have
to be the creator of everything, that is, "The God." No. Consider a modern
Airbus. It was definitely created by some "intelligent designers." But not
necessarily God. If future archeologists find "fossils" of planes from the
remains of Wright Brothers' planes up to the modern Airbus, the evolutionists
of the time would claim that "planes evolved from bicycles." Implying that no
intelligent agents were involved. It all happened on its own. Religious folks,
on the other hand, would argue that there is intelligent design therefore
planes must be created by an all-powerful God! But the truth is that some
intermediary, earthly, intelligent agents, called humans, developed the
planes. The same is true for human body. We should be asking who are those
creators?

~~~
bhnmmhmd
Interesting points! In Ancient Aliens documentary, they claim these
"intelligent creators" are the so-called ETs (aliens). But regardless of
whether that's true or not, one could ask "ok, who created those ETs?" and
again, you'd go one level back and should try to find some older intelligent
beings who designed our creators, etc., etc.

But this has to stop at some point, because the universe - to the best of my
knowledge - is only (!) 13.8 billion years old, thus, some intelligent beings
must have appeared some where in the universe long time ago. The question is:
"how did THAT happen?" It could be that mere _chance_ resulted in a very early
development of intelligent life on a planet in a galaxy far far away. The same
process could have helped shape life on the earth too.

Or, maybe there really was an intelligent _being_ in charge of things that
designed the whole universe such that exactly a few billion years after the
Big Bang, in a specific galaxy and on a specific planet, some certain type of
life would appear which would later create other forms of life, and maybe we
are created by those people, thus, indirectly, created by that "intelligent
being". You may call that "intelligent being" God.

~~~
nyc111
> But this has to stop at some point...

That's my point. We don't need to get into infinite recursion because we
cannot know as humans the ultimate origin of anything. The best we can do is
to try to find out the local and natural intelligent creators acting in nature
within the laws of nature. Those are the things we can know. So, for instance,
we can ask those questions, as you mention, Did someone come from another
world? Is the creator smaller in scale than human body? Is the creator larger
in size than the human body? And let's not forget that the human body is a
symbiotic organism. It's a combination of different organisms living as
symbionts. Which means that they were independent life forms in the infinite
depths of time. These are the interesting questions for me. Trying to explain
transformations with the word "evolution" explains nothing. It's like saying
"sleeping pill will put you to sleep." Nothing is explained.

But I understand that this is a very sensitive topic for many people. These
are just my own opinions.

------
mchahn
I have developed a personal theory that evolution is basically horrible
software that has been tested so long it works reliably. It might even be
literal when you consider DNA.

------
hanuman
And yet, here you are.

------
moonbug
Writes someone who has obviously never menstruated

