My personal favorite poorly designed part of the body is the sinus cavity.

When we used to walk on four limbs, our heads would naturally incline to an angle that allows full drainage of the sinus cavity. Now that we walk upright, there's a dead spot in the back of the cavity where mucus and bacteria can pool. This is why if you're experiencing sinus pressure but you haven't reached the stage where nothing in your head is moving if you tip your head forward you can often feel an immediate lessening of pressure.

Always wondered why after surfing the water didn't drain out of my sinus until I bent over to pick something up. Thanks for the insight!

Also, IIRC, sinus covered in soft draining muscles that oscillate or contract at a slow frequency. That's why you often have one side occluded while the other is not, and after a while the opposite. It's just the way the machine ticks, no need to fight it, only patience.

The muco-ciliary escalator usually takes care of that.

Just spent an hour researching this...now back to work! Not a fan of the dead spot.

A nice picture of laryngeal nerve 'hack' pushed to 11: http://blog.eternalvigilance.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/g...

[feature request] What about the inability to selectively serialize memory and put it into sperm / egg? I mean, I get human long term memory is probably relatively new and gene serialization is as old as time, but it would be incredibly helpful if we could serialize even a little bit of our memories and experiences into our next generation. It would avoid tons of repeat learning every generation needs to figure out (e.g. don't touch fire, don't lick electrical sockets, don't shit in your bed, reading, writing, riding a bike, monads, etc.), and allow us to focus on higher level things like cracking Navier Stokes or unlocking immortality.

That's called "instinct", and the partial implementation "imprinting". "Learning" is how we rush the process ahead of evolution

My favourite flaw is that you can swallow (without problems) pieces that are so large that they can get stuck in your oesophagus further down the line blocking it. You can't even swallow your saliva when that happens.

My vote goes to menstruation.

It's an extremely wasteful exercise.

Most mammals do not need to do it, so there's an existing model for how reproduction can work without the need for ~monthly blood and tissue loss.

Most mammals go through some sort of estrous, but only a few menstruate. The main difference is that humans and some other primates have the capability to mate and rear young pretty much at any time of the year, which is why the women are generally always capable of becoming fertilized.

There are other, more advanced social theories that go into the role menstruation plays in society, but historically, menstruating monthly has been an advantage, not a disadvantage.

Sexual receptivity more than a few days a year has it's redeeming qualities though...

Mother Nature is not, and has never been an engineer. Evolution is trial and error. DNA is spaghetti code of the highest order.

There's a great chapter in "Group Theory in the Bedroom" [https://books.google.com/books/about/Group_Theory_in_the_Bed...] about the hunt for the mapping from DNA sequences to amino acids before the invention of X-ray crystallography allowed for direct observation of the machinery. Many elegant 3-letter mappings were hypothesized and tested chemically and statistically; they were all found to be incorrect.

Spoiler alert: once X-ray crystallography allowed for direct observation, the mapping was found to be a chaotic hodgepodge: some amino acids are coded by only one or two DNA triplets, and some are encoded by several. The only interesting property of the actual coding the book mentioned: the language is such that single-base errors in the triplet for an amino acid tended to result in a triplet that encoded to the same amino acid... For the amino acids involved in the most common cellular processes. In other words, transcription errors tend to not mess up the machinery in ways that are instantly fatal to the cell (because of course!).

Highest order indeed. There is even a very neat scientific article that compares the call graph of the Linux kernel with the "call graph" of the E. Coli genome. The E Coli genome has incredible amounts of copy-paste and legacy code :)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/05/03/linux-vers...

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/20/9186.full

Erm... "software engineers" are not, and have never been engineers. Programming is trail and error. Computer code is spaghetti code of the highest order.

The article is kinda... I dunno. Its solution to the spine problems allegedly caused by walking on two legs is ultimately to go back to walking on four legs. This however... urm... presents its own problems, the solution to which is left as an exercise to the reader.

Build a better human first, then criticize the one that already works...

I suspect the whole article is a joke.

It had brain as hack at #10.

Meandering arteries seems rather questionable. I suspect the existing approach is safer as the shoulder and elbows can take quite a bit of abuse and internal bleeding is a very serious issue.

I would suggest the digestive system is much more of a hack. But, losing the ability to manufacture vitamin C is both unusual (Just some primates and guinea pigs?) and problematic.

I think the biggest flaw is the location of the entertainment center next to sewer system.

If you really think about it, it's probably unavoidable. You have to reward an organism when it performs necessary functions. Which is why defecation and urination are pleasurable.

You could move the piping, but you'd still have to reward the action. And if there's reward sensors there, clever animals will figure out how to trigger the reward without the action.

In other words, you can move the sewer but they'd probably just build another playground there.

I view 'entertainment' as a recall to primitive satisfaction brain response in our first months of life. That's why we kiss who we 'love' (eating him symbolically), etc, etc

You could also make the "full tank condition" painfull, without making draining it pleasurable.

Shouldn't lead to addiction, and would work as well.

At risk of being quoted ... that description already matches my internal experience of the psychology of bodily waste elimination.

I certainly wouldn't characterize urination as fun in the sense of "hm, how can I make this happen more often?"

That would only work if you wanted the organism to always reach a full tank, or near full tank, before taking the action.

I'd wager that's a non-ideal situation. Think about the times you've reached a completely full bladder...not a good position to be in.

So you have a combo. Taking a whiz is pleasurable, so you do it when you can. But if you get over full, you get a nice zap of discomfort to let you know you're in a danger zone.

you make the pain gradually increase from 0 to 1 for blader filled to 0.8 to 1.0 respectivly, and add automatic safety valve to be sure.

It's basically how it works right now, no need for messing with positive reinforcement.

Interesting. I would have thought "no longer feeling full" would have been reward enough for the behavior to be learned.

We spent most of our energy to feel full, why would we want to not feel full?

I'm sorry... I could be the only one, but I've never had trouble with the configuration. I don't know if I would call it the worst. I think cancer would top my list.

Hitchens fan?

What? The brain is nowhere near the butt. /s

My thought exactly! (highfive)

Or maybe these are all just "myths", ie. not still fully understood?

Eg. the retina: https://theconversation.com/look-your-eyes-are-wired-backwar...

That seems to address a subtlety about the layers of the retina, unrelated to the (bigger) problem of the optic nerve unnecessarily punching through the retina, leaving a blind spot that can't pick up light.

This feature/bug is absent in cephalids with no corresponding downside.

The human optic nerve structure makes more sense as being an artifact of path dependence and the "local improvement constraint" than it being (more) globally optimal in design space.

Steven Novella, of the Skeptics Guide, responded to that research in a way that made sense to me: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/scientists-propose-incorrect...

Basically, just because we found some mechanism which compensates for the arrangement does not mean that we found the cause for the arrangement. The cause is more likely to be an evolutionary local maximum.

This kind of reminds me of the idea of "junk DNA". 20 years ago, 90% of our DNA didn't code for specific proteins, so it was labelled "junk".

Fast forward 20 years and folks suddenly realize it does play a role in DNA expression.

Hey people under 30 or so, do you even know who MacGyver is? :)

How do you think we spent our weekend mornings, when our parents where still asleep and A-Team just finished?

I'm actually older than 30, but we didn't have a TV in the house when MacGyver aired, I've never seen an actual episode of the show

MacGyver is referenced all the time, to the point where I imagine most people pick it up from context clues, even if they've never seen the original show

He's the one that travels through space (and sometimes time) through superconducting rings, right?

As a 23 year old: of course! As a kid I used to put seasons of MacGyver on my christmas list. Though to be honest I think I saw Richard Dean Anderson as Colonel O'Neill long before I saw him as MacGyver!

To this day my favorite MacGyverism is bypassing a fuse by wrapping it with tinfoil.

I used that trick once to see if a vintage Pioneer AV receiver with a spent fusible link was worth keeping. I wrapped the link in a gum wrapper and it worked perfectly.

The birth of that show was surprising : http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/11/05/macgyver-the-real-origi...

part 2: http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/12/11/macgyver-the-real-origi... (3 and 4: just click "next" after 2 and 3)

part 5: http://macgyverglobal.com/2013/03/20/macgyver-the-real-origi...

I know who he is, but only because Richard Dean Anderson played in SG1.

There was an article just a few days ago where they found the "backwards" retina has denser cells on the front side which concentrate red and green wavelengths. Seemed a bit fishy to me, but it suggests that we don't that our eyes are not optimal. Some of the other things listed are suspect AFICT because we just don't know all the influences that led to them. Arteries? Those are ancient in origin and reflect a weird balance between flexibility, getting the blood distributed, and not bleeding to death from injuries.

While I'm sure there is hackery behind all of these, I don't think humans know enough yet to claim we could do better.

That's just nature making the best it can of a historical accident.

If you were designing the eye from scratch, you'd have the nerves coming out the back like in squid. Then if you wanted something that concentrates the red and green wavelengths, you could put something else in front of the light sensing cells.

You'd end up exactly where you are now, except you'd not have a huge blind spot, and wouldn't have to spend as much brain power compensating for it.

The blind spot is not huge. It's easily compensated for, and it appears the mammalian eye has other attributes that make it work well. We just don't have enough data to understand whether mammalian eyes embedded a major problem that had to be compensated for, or if this design has attributes that make it desirable.

Maybe, but either vertebrates or cephalopods have to have sub optimal design. My money is on the backwards retina being the kludge.

No, neither is required to have a suboptimal design. Why do you think that? Mammals are quite successful.

They can't both be optimal. The probability that both are exactly equally good is so remote as to be ignorable.

Successful does not imply "no flaws." It's interesting to see this argument brought up in the context of biology. It's frequently applied to software, for example it shows up in basically every discussion of PHP.

>>They can't both be optimal.

They could both be optimal for their respective uses. Humans don't spend a lot of time on the seafloor, and cephalopods don't spend a lot of time in the open air. Certainly there are other tradeoffs to be made as well.

It's 7.5° high and 5.5° wide. If you don't consider that huge, then that's up to you. But for me, that counts as huge, especially since it's fairly near the middle of vision. That's over half the width of my hand at arms length.

So... this makes a difference in your daily life as a nomad hunter or software engineer how? None at all. You just don't perceive it unless you go out of your way to.

The way you're carrying on it's almost like you were the project manager who delivered the blind spot. It's a feature, not a bug. ;)

So, this is the so-called "intelligent design"?

I think not.

Sitting on my desk right now is a long-handled object with a heavy mass at one end, just like a hammer. But the heavy mass pivots in relation to the handle, the handle is ergonomically crafted in the opposite direction from a hammer, and it's covered in buttons. If you try to evaluate the design as a hammer, it's obviously a terrible design -- but it's a pretty good joystick (good enough for me to use, as the 12th best Descent pilot of all time [0].)

What can we say about a designer from just looking at their design? Not much, if we don't understand what their design is for. If we're guessing at intent or guessing at design constraints, there's very little useful we can say, pro or con.

[0] remember Descent? You can still play: http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php

Since the subject is the human body, Descent was great, but it caused me major "motion sickness" (not sure what's the correct term)

> "motion sickness"

That's the correct term. It's also called "kinetosis" -- it's basically when your eyes and the rest of your body disagree about the way you're moving, and your brain freaks out. (Going back to the "design" question -- we don't know why the brain freaks out, or whether there's a benefit to it, so it's hard to evaluate whether it's actually a good system or not.)

Some people have reported significant improvement by playing with higher resolution, a wider field of view, different textures, or (with VR devices like the Oculus Rift) some sort of persistent viewpoint (like a fake nose).

Just to play devil's advocate...

It almost certainly is intelligent design, because it's intelligent given certain constraints (the existing gene pool in a given generation, and the fact that something working is better than something theoretically better but doesn't actually exist). God iterates using an Agile process.

Backlog:

Epic - Improve test coverage

Yes, one gigantic integration test (Live/Die) is unhelpful and makes it very difficult to pinpoint problems. Looking for something beyond "it compiles".

All evidence suggests God is an adherent of the Worse is Better design philosophy.

Like someone playing a piano concerto with 10 fingers. That's such a terrible design. Dawkins would have made the humans with 12 fingers.

Resulting in 12 Commandments instead of 10, and base-12 numeral system? :)

That sounds about right! :) And 16 apostles.

and loads of technical debt, apparently!

I don't know that you can even call this a counter argument to all intelligent design schemes: Christians believe that Adam and Eve live in the garden and were cursed for eating the forbidden fruit. That would make the poor parts the result of transgression and not design (most likely). So they might view it as "corrupted intelligent design"? Unclear.

I'm not too up on all the arguments surrounding intelligent design, I think the biggest issue is that there's no good way to prove / disprove it? In that regard this doesn't really contribute that much then.

The major argument of intelligent design is that everything's so perfectly designed it couldn't have happened by chance. Permitting corruption of that design pretty much eviscerates that primary argument.

I'm glad you bring that up, because these are the kinds of things you should cite to refute someone claiming that biological life bears the signs of an intelligent designer, supernatural or otherwise. What distinguishes intelligent from naive optimization is the ability to refactor instead of just making local improvements.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend toward refuting IDers by claiming that the very prospect of discerning intelligent from unintelligent signals is "unscientific", which is so wrong that it can only survive by groupthink. E.g. How do you even know it's a voice on the other end of the phone rather than static? How do you know the marks on paper are words rather than accidents?

I believe you're wrong. Take german and french cars. One of them, won't say which, are better designed than the others. To say that a plan is NOT designed because it's flawed is like calling names on a programmer because he uses Java.

You don't refute ID by showing some sub-optimal function in an animal body plan, firstly because ID doesn't claim everything is optimal. ID implies intentionality, but does not and can not explicit intentions. Anyone can make an object that by all means can not be the product of a natural phenomena, and still someone else being able to tell it's design, could not really tell the purpose of it. And, of course, if function is obvious, there's also a better solution.

>I believe you're wrong. Take german and french cars. One of them, won't say which, are better designed than the others. To say that a plan is NOT designed because it's flawed

Which is why that wasn't the argument. Both French and German cars have evidence of design (non-local improvements over earlier transportation), and both clear and garbled speech through a telephone have evidence of an intelligent agent behind them. In no case did I suggest making the inference that flaw -> not design. Rather, it's "being constrained to one domain of attraction in designspace" that indicates lack of intelligence behind the optimization.

>You don't refute ID by showing some sub-optimal function in an animal body plan, firstly because ID doesn't claim everything is optimal. ID implies intentionality, but does not and can not explicit intentions.

Specific variants of ID claim certain intentions, and the lack of intelligent optimization would refute intelligence being behind that intention. (To the extent that this intention is deliberately vague and kept from having observable implications, it can be rejected as non-scientific on that basis, without having to assert the claim, which I was criticizing, that the whole enterprise is unscientific.)

>Anyone can make an object that by all means can not be the product of a natural phenomena, and still someone else being able to tell it's design, could not really tell the purpose of it.

That just means inferences here (as everywhere else) are imperfect, not that detection of intelligence is impossible or unscientific. You can't know to 100% certainty whether the sound on the telephone is someone speaking to you or just a random coincidence of static, but that doesn't mean you throw up your hands, remain agnostic, and lambaste the ignoramuses who dare to claim they have heuristics for speech recognition.

There's a little difference between the amount of information in a noisy AT&T iPhone model 1 conversation and a functioning brain. Just sayin'.

The implication of a very sub-optimal design is that the "intelligent" designer is a C- student who probably shouldn't have gotten their degree.

The "unscientific" argument is used because the "we are horribly designed" argument has been done over and over again and ID proponents just dodge it with nonsense about how it's all due to The Fall of Man or whatever.

It's not like they don't know about these problems, or nobody ever told them. They just don't think it disproves their ideas. They're offering an alternative explanation that matches the data, but provides no predictive power. You can't refute that with data, because anything that fails to match results in an alteration of the explanation to match it. All you can do is point out that an explanation with no predictive power is useless.

Darwinism is also full of "x happend differently than previously thought". Any theory is allowed an must adapt to new data. It's not like you're explaning a dozen of particles to which you add a new one every two decades or so. The domain of the theory shapes the theory.

Yes, scientific theories also adapt to new information. However, there's a substantial difference between this and what ID proponents engage in. The evolution (pun intended) of scientific theories involves saying "that was wrong before, here's what we think now" and the newly adapted theory is criticized and tested. Any scientific theory is falsifiable; even if not actually falsified, there's always some test that could, if it produced the appropriate results, disprove the theory.

Intelligent Design is just the God of the Gaps dressed up in scientific-sounding language. It collects the unanswered questions in biology and says, "We do not know how this happened, therefore an intelligence was involved." And of course if you dig deeply enough, "an intelligence" is almost always Yahweh, father of Jesus Christ, although they often try to keep that quiet in order to appear more objective.

There are two basic categories of contradictory facts for ID: there are things like the flaws we're talking about here, which say "this could not be intelligence" and there are direct attacks on the gaps, where unexplained things like the emergence of "irreducibly complex" features are explained naturalistically. Intelligent Design deals with both easily. The former can be dismissed by just saying that the intelligence wasn't involved in that particular bit. Or it can just be ignored, which seems to be the standard reaction. Any resource that discusses evolution will discuss unanswered questions and problems with the theory. Resources for intelligent design, as far as I can find, also discuss unanswered questions and problems with evolution but make no mention of any potential problems with ID. The latter can be dismissed by just moving on and continuing to object to other gaps. Or, as often happens, it can be dismissed by labeling the scientist as an anti-religious bigot.

There is literally no imaginable discovery that could overturn intelligent design. There are many imaginable discoveries that could overturn evolution. That's fundamentally what makes the latter scientific and the former not.

Who has said that planned obsolescence is not involved? Genesis 6:3 talks e.g. of a 120 year life span.

What about the heart or other critical yet non-redundant organs. In the tech world we try to avoid single points of failure like that.

Which is why the Gallifreyans engineered a backup, I assume.

> This change put tremendous pressure on the lower vertebrae, sticking about 80 percent of adults, according to one estimate, with lower back pain.

So it's evolutions fault now that a lot of people are sitting around all day long?

> And to add insult to injury, the width of a woman’s pelvis hasn’t changed for some 200,000 years, keeping our brains from growing larger.

As if increasing something like the pelvis wouldn't have detrimental consequences in other parts of the life.

> A man’s life-giving organs hang vulnerably outside the body.

So where are the statistics that show that this is a problem to begin with? I don't know anybody who got his family jewels ripped off accidentally - technically it could happen of course.

This whole list is ridiculous. The human body is not a buffet where you can take some of this and some of that. It's all interconnected mechanically and physiologically.

Given enough time, all of the listed problems would evolve to a fix. The iterative method has made 2 billion cells work in harmony with just a few kinks. Scrum over waterfall.

No, not necessarily, and I think not particularly likely. Evolution is not "progress". We are not evolving to some platonic ideal. Much of what is discussed in this article are local maxima that our ancestors hit many millions of years ago. Because evolution is not planned, and their is no fitness function other than continued survival, all species are going to be filled with such anatomical quirks.

Wasn't this link about the backwards retina on the front page recently?

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/look-your-eyes...

Some describe it as having been “Designed by Committee”:

http://threepanelsoul.com/2010/07/05/on-design-by-committee/

I think the teeth/jaw issues are a matter of misuse not flawed design. The switch from hunter-gatherer diet to modern diet was too fast to blame hill-climbing evolution errors.

That distinction doesn't make any sense to me. The switch to a modern diet was ultimately a result of evolution. If evolution gave us the ability to radically switch diets, but didn't give us the ability to properly deal with the new diet, then that's an example of evolution producing something flawed.

I disagree that there is no cutoff point for what can be meaningfully blamed on evolution. Would you say that it is an evolutionary flaw that if we drink too much alcohol we get cirrhosis of the liver and die?

I would say that it's an evolutionary flaw that many humans want to drink so much alcohol that they die from it. Just like it's an evolutionary flaw that we like consuming much more food than is good for us, simply because that part evolved in a time when it was physically impossible to overeat consistently.

The article claims the problem is because our brains grew and pushed our teeth forward. Not because of diet.

I should have included this: <http://www.pnas.org/content/108/49/19546.abstract>. There is evidence that agricultural/industrial diet increases dental crownding.

The article included the line "These cusped grinders may have been useful before we learned to cook and process food." which for some reason made me think they were making the same argument.

This seems more like a list of edge cases for things that normally work pretty well. Why not change the things that contribute to war, overpopulation, disease, etc?

There is also the mitochondrial DNA which is probably placed in the most unsafe environment inside the cell.

Mitochondrial DNA needs to be in the mitochondria, presumably because of proximity and/or latency issues. That's why the vast majority of mDNA has moved to the regular DNA or simply disappeared. The stuff that's left behind isn't an accident.

Well, I suppose you would know better than the rest of us! :)

What do these 'hacks' indicate about the Intelligent Designer(s) in charge of human creation? That is, can we, as believers in Intelligent Design, discern anything about the Deity(ies) who did the design? The obvious question is: "how many deities did the design? One or more?" After that, you'd move on to gender, and other indicators. Ultimately, one would hope to be able to have Scientific Proof of the truth of one or more creation stories, and denial of all the others. Or am I just dreaming here?

> What do these 'hacks' indicate about the Intelligent Designer(s) in charge of human creation?

That they likely don't exist.

Yes, you are just dreaming.