> f. Nipples are useless in human males (cf. Ch. 5).
When I was a kid, I got my tonsils removed "because they were useless and a source of illness".
I've recently heard that tonsil removal is now more disputed: it may collect filth, sure, but it may also prevent it from going deeper into the body, which may cause more serious illnesses.
Given its vast complexity, and the timeline of its creation/evolution, I remain skeptical over bold claims about the human body. It's really missing an "as far as we know." The ability to go beyond what is known is paramount to the progress of science, and historically attested with some intensity (e.g. Earth's shape, relativity with time/space & axiomatic geometry). Humility thus feels like a better posture.
Who would let a junior dev trim bits, or boldly modify a decades old codebase?
>The hole in the retina is sizeable (~9 full moons in the sky), but we don’t notice it because [...] (2) our brain automatically fills in gaps in our visual field by interpolation
I still remember this bit from school and various pop-sci book, but is it actually true? Is there really some group of neurons in the brain somewhere that actively tries to restore the "raw" visual information that was blocked by the blind spot?
Thinking of ANNs, I felt it was more realistic that higher layers in the visual cortex are mostly only using the visual information to find patterns anyway, and that they're robust enough they can still find those patterns without the data from the blind spot locations. (As long as a pattern isn't fully contained within the blind spot regions of course)
An analogy would be a QR code reader that can still parse the encoded information if a part of the QR code is missing - but it won't actually "reconstruct" the missing sections to do this.
>(As long as a pattern isn't fully contained within the blind spot regions of course)
There are dedicated optical illusion/explainers that give you the experience of the brain patching over the space with neutral background, even if there's something there, like a symbol or a star.
So if it's something featureless or continuous, like a wall of your room that's a solid color, or a sheet of college ruled paper, the pattern can just be continued.
That said I would stress there's limits to how much of that you can do just by pattern extrapolation as opposed to deriving images from distinct and specific information in a given region of the visual field. You have to know enough about a stretch of visual space to know that it's appropriate to spread a pattern over it, and that's the thing the blind spot doesn't know.
I read this does have a functional reason: Sperm cells have to be kept at slightly lower temperature than the body temperature, so if the testicles were inside the body, the sperm wouldn't survive.
Of course you could ask why sperm is so temperature sensitive in the first place...
This is how future codebases will be analysed. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Evolution been doing Agile for aeons. Responding to change over following a plan ...
Ah; but how annoying it is to discover something like the inverted retina bug, only to figure out it is effectively unsolvable now due to all the follow-up architecture decisions built on it?
It would be nice to refactor some of these. Vas deferens and laryngeal nerve look like easy pickings. Leave me my ear-wiggling. Any last bit of expression matters.
I'm dreading the horror of genetic manipulation it would open. The gene editing craze feels like it is right around the corner.
Not humans specifically but one of my favorite quirks of vertebrate evolution is the recurrent laryngeal nerve that loops around the aorta and goes back up to the larynx[1].
> f. Nipples are useless in human males (cf. Ch. 5).
When I was a kid, I got my tonsils removed "because they were useless and a source of illness".
I've recently heard that tonsil removal is now more disputed: it may collect filth, sure, but it may also prevent it from going deeper into the body, which may cause more serious illnesses.
Given its vast complexity, and the timeline of its creation/evolution, I remain skeptical over bold claims about the human body. It's really missing an "as far as we know." The ability to go beyond what is known is paramount to the progress of science, and historically attested with some intensity (e.g. Earth's shape, relativity with time/space & axiomatic geometry). Humility thus feels like a better posture.
Who would let a junior dev trim bits, or boldly modify a decades old codebase?
>The hole in the retina is sizeable (~9 full moons in the sky), but we don’t notice it because [...] (2) our brain automatically fills in gaps in our visual field by interpolation
I still remember this bit from school and various pop-sci book, but is it actually true? Is there really some group of neurons in the brain somewhere that actively tries to restore the "raw" visual information that was blocked by the blind spot?
Thinking of ANNs, I felt it was more realistic that higher layers in the visual cortex are mostly only using the visual information to find patterns anyway, and that they're robust enough they can still find those patterns without the data from the blind spot locations. (As long as a pattern isn't fully contained within the blind spot regions of course)
An analogy would be a QR code reader that can still parse the encoded information if a part of the QR code is missing - but it won't actually "reconstruct" the missing sections to do this.
But I don't know if it really works like this.
>(As long as a pattern isn't fully contained within the blind spot regions of course)
There are dedicated optical illusion/explainers that give you the experience of the brain patching over the space with neutral background, even if there's something there, like a symbol or a star.
So if it's something featureless or continuous, like a wall of your room that's a solid color, or a sheet of college ruled paper, the pattern can just be continued.
That said I would stress there's limits to how much of that you can do just by pattern extrapolation as opposed to deriving images from distinct and specific information in a given region of the visual field. You have to know enough about a stretch of visual space to know that it's appropriate to spread a pattern over it, and that's the thing the blind spot doesn't know.
What about testicles outside the body? Every man has a painful story why it’s not a good idea..
I read this does have a functional reason: Sperm cells have to be kept at slightly lower temperature than the body temperature, so if the testicles were inside the body, the sperm wouldn't survive.
Of course you could ask why sperm is so temperature sensitive in the first place...
If elephants did it, I’m sure we can too.
This is how future codebases will be analysed. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Evolution been doing Agile for aeons. Responding to change over following a plan ...
Ah; but how annoying it is to discover something like the inverted retina bug, only to figure out it is effectively unsolvable now due to all the follow-up architecture decisions built on it?
It would be nice to refactor some of these. Vas deferens and laryngeal nerve look like easy pickings. Leave me my ear-wiggling. Any last bit of expression matters.
I'm dreading the horror of genetic manipulation it would open. The gene editing craze feels like it is right around the corner.
I cannot wait for the second pair of arms. :D
How about feeling the hand even after amputation. What do you think, why is it so?
The eyes of squids are right side out, unlike ours. I wonder what other animals have the "correct" version of these features.
You’ve probed Chesterton’s Fence; now let’s turn the page to Chesterton’s Appendix!
Not humans specifically but one of my favorite quirks of vertebrate evolution is the recurrent laryngeal nerve that loops around the aorta and goes back up to the larynx[1].
In giraffes that nerve is several meters long.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve
Came here to say just this.
Another interesting one is the auricular tubercle[1], where the genetic trait of a "pointy" ear found in other mammals reappears in some humans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_tubercle
Cool, maybe we could make CRISPR elves?