Review: Evolution
Amid all the recent chatter about evolution, here's an important
question not enough people ask: Just what has evolution done for us
lately?
Sure, it gave us some good innovations a while back: the opposable
thumb was one winner. But what about all the years since then? In many
ways, it seems that evolution hasn't hooked us up as much as it could
have.
For instance, why are so many people still nearsighted? Shouldn't we
all have perfect vision by now? Wasn't natural selection supposed to
select out those that couldn't see? Instead, the opposite happened -
most of us have some sort of vision defect. Apparently evolution
thought producing humans that could invent LASIK surgery and
1-800-CONTACTS would take care of everything. Or maybe there's some
advantage to seeing things best at a distance of, oh, an inch.
Evolution has dropped the ball on other parts of the body, too.
Take the ironically named "wisdom" teeth, which usually have
to be removed. Why are they still around? All they do is get impacted.
Again, we have oral surgeons stepping up to bat on this one, but it'd
be nice not to have to go through the whole
face-swelling-downing-Percocet-have-to-stay-home-for-a-week thing.
Consider, too, the appendix, an organ that has no function but to get
infected and risk killing us if it bursts, like on that scary episode
of "Diff'rent Strokes" where Arnold had to go to the hospital. Thanks a
whole frickin' lot, evolution!
And the human reproductive system has evolved to the point where
female fertility begins in middle school. So, apparently, girls should
start having babies around age 12? Yeah, evolution, THAT sounds like a
good idea.
But enough about us. What about dinosaurs? Why did they have to die
out? Evidently their lifestyle just wasn't suited to the finicky tastes
of evolution. What was it? Were they not strong enough fighters? Did
they choose the wrong food source? Should they have switched to the
South Beach Diet?
If dinosaurs had only been given more of a chance, I just know we
humans would have given them a hand and helped them survive. Humans
have a long history of helping other species.
Whatever the issue was, maybe evolution shouldn't have been so hasty.
Wouldn't it be cool to have dinosaurs around nowadays? Sitting right
next to the pigeons atop your office building, there could be a
pterodactyl. That would be awesome. Awesome! Instead, we have to
content ourselves with watching Jurassic Park DVDs and visiting
exhibits in natural history museums.
So at least we're still around. For some reason, evolution has
allowed humans to endure, even if we haven't made all that much
progress from the common ancestor we share with apes.
But what happened to the prehensile tail? Why should, like, spider
monkeys have one and not us? Okay, so
wearing pants would be more complicated with a tail, but evolution
could have trusted the fashion industry to respond, just like oral
surgeons did with the teeth thing. Wouldn't it be fun right now to
have a tail to hang from trees with? Imagine relaxing down in Florida,
hanging from a palm tree. But nope. We must sit on the beach, looking
up from our novels now and then to make sure coconuts don't fall on
our heads.
Speaking of heads, let's look inside ours: you may have noticed
that the development of the human brain hasn't been all you might have
expected, given that it's had 4 million years to develop. There
are still a lot of really dumb people out there. There's no way to
sugarcoat that. It's sad but true. (Maybe even sadder than the fact we
got screwed on the tail issue.)
Despite evolution's shortcomings from the human perspective, we can't
forget that the process has been extremely good to some of our fellow
organisms — bacteria, for instance, which continue to develop ever
greater resistance to antibiotics at a breakneck pace. At least it's
breakneck in contrast to the pace of evolutionary progress in humans,
which seems to take a zillion years for anything to happen. Okay, it
makes sense that evolution would act more quickly in a small organism
that constantly reproduces, blah blah, blah — but still, it's hard not
to be jealous. Evolution, you're soo there for bacteria; isn't it time
you showed us some love too?
— Liz Khalil (thegreatlizby@yahoo.com)
