Yes, the only other issues were dying from a particularly virulent germ introduced into that diverise biome, or being an elder at… 35?
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well i hope your wisdom teeth are in your head!! 
to be fair a lot of evolutionary theories are other people’s evo-bio bsing. all these kinds of things are very hard to prove, especially because there’s probably no one single reason
( and i think it’s even true that species sometimes get traits because some other gene associated trait was selective… so who knows for sure. evolution is a mess 
)
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Most of the bacteria not in raw meat isn’t all that dangerous, and if you have an intentestine already overflowing with good bacteria, it’s actually quite hard for “bad” bacteria to get a foothold.
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Most of those would have been from wounds, bacterially speaking, as antibiotics aren’t all that useful for having eaten food gone bad. There are loads of ways to die, bad food is such a small subset.
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True, food poisoning isn’t generally fatal. Sure is unpleasant, though.
I know this isn’t the point you were making, but when people talk about this stuff there’s often an Appeal to Nature fallacy wherein it’s presumed we were all happy and healthy before all of modernity because evolution made us to handle everything.
What those people don’t seem to grok is, nature doesn’t care how you feel. As @SamSam pointed out above, it only cares that you live long enough to reproduce (maybe a little longer for child care). It doesn’t care how much GI pain you are in that whole time, or how sick and riddled with parasites you are. Which, incidentally, wild animals are. Wild animals live short, brutal lives filled with parasites, characterized by hunger, cold, and various ailments.
It’s because of modernity and science that we’re happy and healthy, as well as living longer. Happy enough to long for some imaginary past where we imagine it was all Disney forests full of happy apes.
Sorry if I’m shooting the messenger here, I just wanted to take the opportunity to make this point about a peeve of mine.
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I don’t want to judge the original research, but the way the video presents it leaves a lot of questions if it’s not being explicity Lamarckian.
If (rapidly) shrinking jaw size is genetic, what is the selection pressure that could drive that, given that the resulting problems could be quite serious even for young people (without treatment)? The implication is that for some reason, small-jawed lines completely won out within a couple dozen generations, despite having more life-threatening dental complications.
Or is the theory that jaws develop differently depending on childhood diet? That would make more sense, but it seems like it would be well known if feeding kids seeds meant they never had to go to the dentist.
I gather it’s not uncommon for people to have a third set of teeth, as in, the tooth fairy returns for round 2; though I gather from the same second-hand source that usually these extra teeth remain as undeveloped buds that only show up on X-rays. So, like, each tooth is a kind of Pez dispenser which normally only comes loaded with 2 Pez. But wisdom teeth are separate Pez dispensers which usually come with just 1 Pez each.
But then that French guy who ate planes had an extra set of teeth side-by-side with the main set, like a shark, so who knows. Beyond a certain point it gets too disturbing to wonder about.
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It could simply be sexual attraction. That drives a lot of genetic selection and there’s often no reason for it. Evolution doesn’t do everything for a good reason. Stuff just happens sometimes.
There’s no selection pressure the other way due to dental problems in young people because that has no effect on reproduction. Again, evolution doesn’t optimize for good health and comfort. It only optimizes for reproduction. Having a mouth full of bad painful teeth doesn’t stop you from having and raising ten kids.
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The only decent TED talks I’ve ever seen were “look at this cool art I made.” 20 minutes just isn’t enough time to convey the kind of learning some people seem to think TED talks can achieve. All knowledge gets reduced to unsupported factoids. The fact that people once speculated that TED talks could replace college still fills me with incandescent rage.
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There are a few good ones…
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I never noticed that before, but he just straight-up doesn’t have canines. He looks like a real life ventriloquist dummy or nutcracker.
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I was thinking more that if you have a family who physically can’t eat acorns when times are hard, that is a survival disadvantage. Plus there’s the whole business of dying from the slightest infection, though idk if untreated dental problems are a big issue in that regard.
(I’ve been phenomenally fortunate with my teeth and never even had a cavity, so I have only my imagination as a guide to what can go wrong with more highly evolved people’s mouths)
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The fact that our immune systems are primed to battle intestinal parasites, and actually end up attacking our own intestines if there are none does give me a good idea about what we’ve evolved to survive. I’m kinda on the fence with discussions about gut flora, I agree there’s no immediate benefits to it being more varied, but there are also quite a few studies that show reducing the variety and amount aren’t beneficial.
The other bit I might have a slight issue with is the idea that our long, fairly untroubled lives are the ideal?
I’m having trouble putting it into words, but this put it into a nice frame for me. Dogs definitely live an easier, less disease ridden life, but loads of dogs are stressed, I seem to remember 70%+ with stress related disorders? Easier lives aren’t necessarily the most fufilling. I’ll be fucked if I know an answer to what is the ideal (and I’m just as unsure if there is an ideal).
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The science is on the fence about it too, so you’re not alone. 
The current consensus seems to be that it’s probably more important than we used to realize, but not as important as pop culture currently believes. Gut flora has become the new miracle cure for everything, but that’s way way ahead of anything that science currently agrees on. The current consensus is mostly, “uh, it’s complicated and don’t mess with it until we figure some stuff out”.
Oh, forgive me if I implied that. Certainly our lives are not ideal. We have lots of new problems created by modernity, mostly around stress, anxiety, depression, etc. Also probably allergies, and a lot of cancers (not counting the ones that we get simply because we live a lot longer now). The complexity of modern life is definitely something we’re not well wired for, and we’re still figuring out how much challenge people need, how much nature exposure is important, how to manage anxiety, etc.
I think it’s the same with dogs and people- we’ve gotten very very good at sorting out physical comfort. We eat all we want, sit in air conditioned buildings and have a pill for every ailment. However now we get bored, anxious, stressed, and tired from everything. The mental health stuff is way way behind, and it’s the same with pets, I think.
If nothing else, wild animals are too busy with survival to ever be bored or anxious much. So it is with humans. If you lived in, say, the 1600s in a farm house, you literally spent every waking free moment chopping firewood to keep from freezing to death over the winter. It takes a tremendous amount of firewood to stay alive through an entire North American winter. With burdens like that lifted, we have a lot of free time*, but we’re not very good at figuring out what to do with it.
*I use this term very loosely. I know that everyone is actually very busy working multiple jobs and so on, but you kinda get what I mean, hopefully.
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Fair, there will be some good interesting and informative talks mixed in there. It’s not fully impossible, but I would argue the hit rate is very, very low. In addition to a topic that will actually work well in the format, you need a rare combination of correctly sized topic and TED asking an expert who will be good in the 20 minute format.
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Could be… I’ve never just watched a TED talk for it’s own sake, but more likely because of the speaker… If it’s someone I know and whose work I enjoy, I watch it… if it’s just some rando I’ve never heard of, and the topic seems sketchy or questionable, pass…
Here’s another good one:
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Case in point:
I just tried to find a particularly bad TED talk that I remembered, as an example of the problem with the format. It was about learning styles, and the guy was making an impassioned plea for how kinematic learners need to go to dance-based schools because they “need to move to think” or some such. It was actually a pretty compelling speech, very well articulated, and he was very charismatic in the way he punched up the emphasis in all the right moments. Many of my friends sent me that video enthusiastically extolling this revolution coming to education.
Here’s the problem- learning styles are bullshit. Always have been. They are made up nonsense that have never had the slightest validity to them. There was no actual science in this guy’s talk at all, but he spoke with such charismatic sciencey-sounding authority that you felt this must be all true.
Even more hilariously emblematic of the problems of TED- I just tried to find this video to post, and I found roughly thirty TED talks on learning styles- about half debunking them, and half extolling their virtues. To be crystal clear on this once again, there is no legit scientific debate about this. Learning styles are bullshit. This TED discrepancy doesn’t reflect some larger debate in the scientific community.
It simply means they have no standards. If you’re a compelling speaker, you can come up and say whatever you want and people will think it’s science. That’s their brand. Facts and legitimacy play no part in who they give their platform to.
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Well-put. Reminds me of this guy riffing on Ted Talk speaking style.
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I’ve always assumed the same. It makes sense to get new teeth in stages. We get our second set between the ages of 6 and 12, nicely spread-out over time so that teeth can shift around as needed to account for lost ones, and then another four around age 20, nicely pushing teeth closer together and filling a few more gaps. Then if, by the time you’re 40 you’ve lost a lot more, well, you’re probably a grandparent by then.
Sharks continually shed their teeth and grow new ones, presumably to account for all the wear and tear.
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In fact most fish, amphibians, and reptiles can keep generating new teeth to help with wear and tear, although sharks stand out for replacing the whole set at once. Mammals seem to have lost the ability to go with producing more specialized teeth, where the ones at the front and back are all formed differently.
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Thank you. Much better articulated than what I was managing.
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