“Me doing the rhinoceros so that my children are born with a nice nose.” A few days ago, an Argentine tiktoker shared a video from the hospital after a rhinoplasty and the gozadera was formed. More than 200,000 reproductions, hundreds of comments and a viral joke throughout the Internet.
A bunch of very counterintuitive ideas. As I write this, the tiktok is unpublished, but in reality the video is the least of it. It helps us to ask ourselves something interesting. Why is evolution so difficult and counterintuitive? Why is it so hard to understand? Why do things like Lamarkism resist dying so insistently?
It’s not a Tiktok thing. The reference to Lamarkism (the idea that the traits acquired by the individual throughout his life are passed on to his descendants) is not free, of course. Also a few days ago, a tweet went viral according to which more and more babies are born without wisdom teeth. The explanation given was that “(new) humans’ faces are getting shorter as a result of eating processed food and cooking fire.”
The tweet referenced Teghan Lucas, a professor of forensic anatomy at Adelaide’s Flinders University who does indeed work on human ‘microevolutions’. That is, in genetic changes that occur within specific populations. Lucas, for example, has a very interesting article on how the middle artery in the arm is becoming more common, and sure enough, some videos talk about the wisdom tooth in rather confusing terms.
Why are more and more people without wisdom teeth? The explanation is very simple: as we improve cooking techniques and oral hygiene, our teeth hold up better and this allows people without wisdom teeth to reach reproductive age in better health.
It’s not that eating processed food makes teeth disappear, it’s that with processed food (and oral health) people without wisdom teeth don’t have as many problems as they used to. The end result is that children without wisdom teeth increase.
A small but crucial conceptual change. It seems a matter of detail, but it is not. The whole modern idea of evolution hangs on that: with the permission of epigenetics, nothing that does not modify germ cells (sperm cells or eggs) passes from parent to child.
And I say that it is crucial because we are heading towards a moment in which genetic techniques are going to allow us to touch, precisely, the germinal line. They are allowing us. We will be able to make changes that pass from parent to child at will. That is, we are about to be able to “break” the human species into pieces and understanding how evolution works is key to this.
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