I don't think there has to be a reason why sugar tastes good even though it's bad for your teeth. Monkeys eat fruit. We have common ancestors with monkeys. Maybe we just didn't need to free up those sugar-liking genes all those years later even though some of us haven't had too much of it for thousands of years.
Ah, ok, it's not a mystery why we'd like all the sugars that are just excellent free calories.
It is a mystery why we like the one sugar (sucrose, and in fact we have a special enzyme to turn it into glucose and fructose in the gut) which, in combination with the bacterium streptococcus mutans, rots our teeth.
Tooth decay would be fatal in wild animals. Was probably pretty fatal anyway, pre-antibiotics.
A taste for something that kills you is a mystery, and needs an explanation.
I don't think so. Evolution is fucked up. It doesn't have to "make sense."
Maybe the tooth decay, relative to the lifespan of wild animals, isn't an important factor. Some wild animals even retain the ability to regrow teeth forever, so they wouldn't give a damn.
> I don't think so. Evolution is fucked up. It doesn't have to "make sense."
Yes it does. Not one unlawful thing has ever happened. Confusion and mystery are facts about our minds, not about the universe.
And we're getting there. More and more things make sense every year. No theory has ever explained more things or had more supporting evidence.
If you've got a fact about the world, it will make sense in the light of evolution, or it will refute the entire theory. There aren't many paradoxes left. New ones are always fascinating.
You find a fish with feathers, and no one can explain how that happened, I'll start believing in God.
> Some wild animals even retain the ability to regrow teeth forever, so they wouldn't give a damn.
True, but not mammals! We lost that or repurposed it somehow during our 'tiny insectivore' period.
Leftover from fruit-eating monkeys? Evolution doesn't have to "make sense" in the teleological sense.
Sorry, don't understand?
I don't think there has to be a reason why sugar tastes good even though it's bad for your teeth. Monkeys eat fruit. We have common ancestors with monkeys. Maybe we just didn't need to free up those sugar-liking genes all those years later even though some of us haven't had too much of it for thousands of years.
Ah, ok, it's not a mystery why we'd like all the sugars that are just excellent free calories.
It is a mystery why we like the one sugar (sucrose, and in fact we have a special enzyme to turn it into glucose and fructose in the gut) which, in combination with the bacterium streptococcus mutans, rots our teeth.
Tooth decay would be fatal in wild animals. Was probably pretty fatal anyway, pre-antibiotics.
A taste for something that kills you is a mystery, and needs an explanation.
I don't think so. Evolution is fucked up. It doesn't have to "make sense."
Maybe the tooth decay, relative to the lifespan of wild animals, isn't an important factor. Some wild animals even retain the ability to regrow teeth forever, so they wouldn't give a damn.
> I don't think so. Evolution is fucked up. It doesn't have to "make sense."
Yes it does. Not one unlawful thing has ever happened. Confusion and mystery are facts about our minds, not about the universe.
And we're getting there. More and more things make sense every year. No theory has ever explained more things or had more supporting evidence.
If you've got a fact about the world, it will make sense in the light of evolution, or it will refute the entire theory. There aren't many paradoxes left. New ones are always fascinating.
You find a fish with feathers, and no one can explain how that happened, I'll start believing in God.
> Some wild animals even retain the ability to regrow teeth forever, so they wouldn't give a damn.
True, but not mammals! We lost that or repurposed it somehow during our 'tiny insectivore' period.