You need mucus and it's a lot more convenient to dump it down the throat where it can pull double duty as lubricant and be recycled than have it come out the front all the time.

> Seems so unnecessarily dangerous.

I agree, but it hasn't killed enough to evolutionarily matter.

It has for fish!

Its worse for Squid their brain is a torus shape with its esophagus running through the middle. their brain cannot stretch but their esophagus can making it so that if a squid were to swallow to large of a bite it can rip their brain.

> Seems so unnecessarily dangerous.

It's not like there's no mitigation in place in the body itself.

Sure, but that's another hack.

Evolution's solution: cough it out

Better solution: don't send food, water, and air down the same pipe in the first place

I mean, no competent engineer would design the plumbing for a building such that the same pipes were used for water and air at different times, right?

a software engineer would. we call it "multiplexing".

That reminds a bit of systems where the data plane and control plane are the same. Like the old AT&T phone network.

No its not just cough it out. The mechanism to avoid food and fluids is a lot more complex than that.

pee and reproduction too

I've read that urination actually helps by cleaning out the urethra after ejaculation, though, stopping some diseases - which some people think might be why men have the urge to pee often after sex. So it may not be as evolutionary crazy as one would think

Same for women...

"In every final scan we could see a big, full bladder, even though most of the women went to the toilet before they went inside the MRI,” explains Pek with comical astonishment. “We think it might be evolution’s way to force women to urinate after sex. Perhaps our ancestors developed this function to avoid urinary tract infections, but that’s only a hypothesis."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvgkzw/the-story-of-the-dutc...

wait until you hear about the cloaca

> A cloaca is the posterior orifice that serves as the only opening for the digestive, reproductive, and urinary tracts of many vertebrate animals.

> All amphibians, reptiles, birds, and a few mammals have this orifice, from which they excrete both urine and feces.

> Mating through the cloaca is known as cloacal copulation, commonly referred to as cloacal kiss.

> The cloacal region is also often associated with a secretory organ, the cloacal gland, which has been implicated in the scent-marking behavior of some reptiles, marsupials, amphibians, and monotremes.