Evolution?
Yesterday, as my mother mused over the x-rays of my head hanging on the wall in my dentists office, she expressed the opinion that my missing wisdom tooth was evolution eliminating an unneccesary vestigial part of the body. This statement raised questions for me about evolution that have been bothering me for a while.
First, all of my conclusions in this post are based upon the assumption that evolution is purely the result of darwinian natural selection, and that nature doesn't take a more proactive approach at altering DNA. Also, this post is totally excluding religion as an explanation, because devout as I am, I don't think we can deny the existence of dinosaurs or other past species. If "evolution" fits into a grander scheme of things, that is a topic for another discussion.
There is no logical way evolution can explain the trends that are occuring to certain species and how fast they are at work. I'm mainly going to discuss the human species, becuase through modern society we have pretty much eleminated the factor of natural selection. However, certain changes are still taking place among our species. For example, in medieval times King Arthur was said to be 6 feet tall, and they considered him a giant. Today 6 feet tall is closer to average. No one can tell me that that is because the tall guys got laid more. Also, if you look at the records of olympic athletes, humans have been getting more and more athletic over the past 150 years (since the games were reinstated, I'm unsure of the exact year). I think that it is highly unlikely that natural selection alone could be responsible for these athletic changes. Because, like I said before, humans have no natural predators and virtually no competition among each other for mating rights, so any changes could not be explained by the darwinian principles of evolution. To bring this post full circle, I doubt the number of wisdom teeth people have prevents them from scoring, yet it seems that they are being phased out of our bodies. Things like this can only point towards a more proactive approach our bodies take towards evolution. Is there someway that our bodies can detect necessary changes and pass those along to our children?
posted by Cliff @ 9:48 AM
2 Comments:
What is the change in wisdom teeth going on? They're useless yes, but before you can say they've become useless too fast to be explained by evolutionary processes, we must at least know how long these teeth have been useless.
As to non-evolutionary reasons why we are taller than our forebears, the one most typically given is that our nutrition has improved immensely since that time, as has our health in general. We're entering puberty younger and growing more as a result of this.
Well, I presume they've been useless since the human race stopped foraging, but my question isn't whether evolution is eleminating the teeth, it is that they currently have no effect on natural selection, so why are they disappearing anyway? I was, however, not aware of the nutritional explanation of our growth development, but it makes sense. If I can think of any other specific examples of changes that have taken place outside of what would be termed natural selection, I'll post them.
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