[rsync]

Evolution isn’t stupid … it’s not a random outcome that we don’t produce our own vitamin c, or have an appendix, or (urate oxidize blah blah).

I wish you all the luck in fixing these problems and would be fascinated to see the outcomes… However, this notion that these changes would be cost free is a mistaken one.

Mutants with these characteristics have certainly existed over evolutionary time… Our version outcompeted them.

[colechristensen]

>Evolution isn’t stupid

Evolution also isn't smart. Have so much of something in your diet and you'll tend to lose the ability to manufacture it because there's little evolutionary pressure to maintain it. If you're a VitaminCless mutant you don't die and your children survive just fine and suddenly this becomes common in the species.

It didn't get lost because it was advantageous for it to be gone, it just wasn't important enough to get maintained.

[stubish]

Evolution does not optimize for quality of life. And evolution certainly creates some pretty stupid outcomes, as it favors slapping on quick fixes at random rather than intelligently engineering the problem away. So we have hardware problems like our blind spots that got 'fixed' in software, unlike other species that evolved eyes separately and happened to get the wiring right.