Curios

Is the Human Body Grossly Overdesigned?

Blame the engineers! Blame the architects! Blame somebody; either way, it would appear that we have lots of redundancy built into our design as Homo sapiens.

With little or no side effects, you could live with the loss of:

• one of your two kidneys;
• your gall bladder;
• your appendix;
• your spleen;
• your reproductive organs (well, yes, some side effects);
• your colon (ditto);
• half your liver (it will regenerate);
• your stomach (B12 vitamin supplements required);
• and one whole lung.

Not to mention, 1–2% of your breathing is done by your skin, and that’s without practicing. I mean, considering how well beginners play piano (ie not very), the possibilities in this regard are vast!

Even more incredibly, people can live relatively normal lives despite losing about 50% of their brain. (There’s even a famous case of a normal functioning adult—married, kids, civil servant etc—with as much as 75% reduction in usual brain matter.)

And that’s before we consider the incredible work ongoing in lab-grown regeneration (lungs, hearts, bladders, and the like).

Makes you wonder what we could do if we redesigned all that biological real estate, doesn’t it? One could free up about a cubic foot for other essential things: a little safe or refrigerator, say, or even a powerbank charging station for an iPhone…

Thanks for reading!

More of the same blend of interesting and quirky next Saturday.