Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (Or Don't)

by Alex Bezzerides

As humans, we are uniquely prone to aches and pains because of our evolutionary history. In particular, our switch to bipedalism and the development of our giant brains have forced anatomical compromise and jury-rigging throughout the human body from head to toe. From teeth with braces to feet with orthotics, we spend our lives covering up and working around anatomical shortcomings that resulted from trade-offs made by our ambitious ancestors.

The brain-to-body-mass ratio explains why animals with some of the largest brains in the world do not rival us for intelligence. Elephant and whale brains are physically much larger than ours, but compared with their incredible masses their brains are relatively small. Their large brains are necessary because it takes a giant nervous system to run a giant animal.

walking upright, and the consequential freeing of the hands, happened before the increase in cranial capacity.

It wasn’t until the hands became free that the mind took off.

Humans and dolphins seem to suggest that exposure to a novel environment is a critical ingredient in the evolutionary recipe for extreme intelligence.

I would argue that when they dig up fossils of Homo sapiens in the future and display them in museums, we will be the shining example of a transitional organism. Our crooked teeth, twisted spines, flat feet, broken ankles, constricted birth canals, and countless other features will show how we struggled to fight through the period when we ceased to be arboreal.