Medical science is one of the only reasons I’m happy to be alive now and not during other times. Everything else is absolute shit, but our ability to manage and cure disease and the like is amazing.
Dude modern needles alone make it so much better
It means that humans developed empathy and the scientific means to help each other avoid natural selection. Intraspecies and interspecies empathy is the cheat code against natural selection. Certain ram species, for example, also were not designed intelligently, so as they age they may grow their horns until they penetrate their skull and kill them. Natural selection is most effective when it culls prior to the life form procreating. However, thanks to the power of empathy, we can abate natural selection by performing oral surgery on humans (ideally in our adolescence for wisdom teeth removal) and by shaving rams’ horns as they age. Ideally, as science develops and empathy spreads, we can come up with more effective and painless means to ensure everybody has a chance to live and be happy.
Evolution didn’t make your teeth to grow like this. While people in the past probably had shitty teeth keep in mind that modern diets filled with sugars, processed food and all sort of junk are a cause of teeth problems
That’s a wisdom tooth. They just grow like that, no sugar needed (I am wrong)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_tooth
“The oldest known impacted wisdom tooth belonged to a European woman who lived between 13,000 and 11,000 BCE, in the Magdalenian period. Nonetheless, molar impaction was relatively rare prior to the modern era. With the Industrial Revolution, the affliction became ten times more common, owing to the new prevalence of soft, processed foods.”
Me: does nothing
Evolution: fuck you
Born without wisdom teeth…
Not sure if that makes me more evolved or less lol
Mine’s are pointing 90° on the wrong direction.
They are dormant but I’ve warned that if they decide to start being funny I’ll be fucked. :D
mine grew in sideways too. I have had them all removed now, but my teeth are forever fucked because of them.
Depends. I had 4 at 90°. Only one hurt a little. They caused pockets, which are hard to clean (impossible by yourself) and can accelerate bone loss. I removed 3 of them. 2 by a jaw surgeon. They were creating a space bewteen molars deeper inside the bone, while also creating an opening at the top. Nasty.
Chronic inflamation of the gums don’t hurt either. Best way to tell is by a mouth hygiënist. If your gums bleed easily while flossing, it’s a good idea to keep flossing. Takes about 1-2 weeks before the gums calm down and the swelling dissipates. I use those tiny round brushes to get in between. If you start using those, m start with the thinnest wire. The metal should absolutely not scrape against the teeth, only the brush.
Taken years to form that habit…
I went to the dentist and he was looking at me all surprised and he said, you’re jaw is so primitive, all your wisdom came through without issues.
A few years later I had to have an emergency removal because they decayed too much as I didn’t brush that far back
I only had them on the right side. Not shure what this means evolutionary…
Better than the wrong side I guess 🤷
Dude, more. 200% more as my wife and I sit her and suffer tonight. She’s getting it dealt with next month, mine rotting out while I wait to even get a luxury bone appointment.
You are the clear evolutionary winner.
Pre-anethesia, you mean. There were dentists around for a long time, but I don’t think you would’ve enjoyed being their patient…
Fun (horrifying) fact: the reason barber poles have red on them is to represent the blood from when they offered tooth extractions
Doesn’t it say that it is advertising bloodletting?
This is what gets me about the sentiment of “humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years without toothpaste/sunscreen/antibiotics/vaccines/etc and we were just fine!”
My dude, we were most definitely not fine. A lot of people died painful and preventable deaths, many of them children, and we’re around today because existing that way was just good enough to keep us going as a species.
“They were just fine!” You mean that the 40-60% of people who lived past 15 were just fine until about 50-70?
Just because people still lived a long time doesn’t mean they had a good time living.
Pre-dentistry, a bunch of your teeth would have fallen out before your wisdom teeth came in. There would have been space for the wisdom teeth so they wouldn’t need to come in sideways.
We used to have larger mouths, they’ve been shrinking as we evolved
they’ve been shrinking as we
evolvedchanged our dietNo genetic changes (evolution) happened. If as children we ate only very tough meat and lots of chewy vegetables - no bread or rice or potato softness - our same genetics would result in much larger adult jaws.
That’s right, my bad
Gonna feed my kid nothing but well-done steaks and tree bark for the jaw gainz.
How are we supposed to be taken seriously in glactic politics if we can’t chomp aliens in a few thousand years.
Are you sure about that? We lost so many teeth after the industrialisation of sugar production (machines and slavery) but I’m not sure how bad it was before then.
Not cleaning teeth is pretty bad for teeth.
Teeth used to get cleaned by means of chewing harder food regularly, and they needed less cleaning to start with due to a lot less sugar in those foods though
Also, for example in medieval times, they did clean teeth with herbs and stuff.
Ancient Babylon and Egyptians used frayed twig, according to my search!
So I searched it up. Food that was more abrasive, no refined carbs, more fibrous, more meat, less grain, more tannins. And ancient toothbrushes from frayed twigs, which also contained natural antimicrobials!
Thanks for prompting this educational exchange!
And our teeth really went downhill after we started reproducing without the quality check provided by survival of the fittest. The remains of hunter gatherers generally have very nice teeth.
Nah.
There seems to be a genetic variation that eliminates some or all wisdom teeth. It arose in Asia so long ago that the people who populated North and South America also had it. And in most populations it is still not very prevalent (less than 50%). Despite having been around for ages.
My mom only had the lower two wisdom teeth, none on top.
I don’t follow the logic. Human teeth would be better if more children died? That “quality check” only applies if an organism dies before mating, which happens usually around teenage years for humans.
Maybe those hunter gatherers had better teeth because of what they ate. There seems to be too many other potential factors to simply pawn it off on Darwinism.
In a study published in the latest Nature Genetics, Cooper and his research team looked at calcified plaque on ancient teeth from 34 prehistoric human skeletons. What they found was that as our diets changed over time — shifting from meat, vegetables and nuts to carbohydrates and sugar — so too did the composition of bacteria in our mouths.
However, the researchers found that as prehistoric humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming, certain types of disease-causing bacteria that were particularly efficient at using carbohydrates started to win out over other types of “friendly” bacteria in human mouths. The addition of processed flour and sugar during the Industrial Revolution only made matters worse.
Evolutionarily, it only matters that you reproduce.
… and that your children survive to reproduce
Otherwise we’d have no incentive to care for our kids.
We DO NOT have any incentive to grow up kids. I have never feel that impulse…
People generally have a sex drive, then develop an instinctual drive to protect their children after they are born. Of course, contraception allows us to sate our sex drive without it resulting in children, so you can choose to opt out of the evolutionary process before you develop an instinctual drive to raise children in the first place. Most people still have that instinct ready to kick in for a child that is not their own if such a situation arises, which is still evolutionarily advantageous for the group as a whole, even if it’s not for the individual.
Of course in rare cases some people lack that instinct entirely, but that’s the exception not the rule.
Yep. Very few people would waste all their money and tear up their vagina and lose all their sleep for three years, and free time for atleast a decade, on purpose. We have an evolutionary drive to.
Mine is near to 0. I have never feel that I need a kid. I have felt I need sex, but I can do it without repercussions… My response is simpler: people are idiot, have sex without protection and have kids.
I get it, but man I can’t imagine being in the mood to reproduce while nursing an infected tooth.
There’s a solution to this. Reproduce before it becomes an issue.
I can‘t even do that. The reason: Skill issue
So that’s evolution at work.
Based
Every time people say “it’d be nice to live in the 50s” or something like that, I always think: “Nope, I’d never trade modern medicine for anything else.”
Hell, even just 30 years ago was way different. My experience of getting a root canal in 2024 was a million times better than when I had one in the ‘90s.
Science is pretty goated ngl
Dude medical science is progressing at a rate where I might genuinely be able to cheer science on to outpace my natural aging for certain age-related procedures and ailments that commonly afflict people late in life
Watched a documentary on the history of surgery and man, modern medicine is one of the things I’m grateful for.
I saw the X-ray of my own jaw and they wanted to remove my wisdom teeth and were asking if they hurt (they don’t) because they are fully sideways and apparently pressing against a nerve.
I ain’t paying for that shit. They don’t bother me. I don’t care how gnarly it looks; it’s unnecessary and expensive.
I delayed it for maybe 10 years after they first started asking if I wanted to get them removed, then finally decided it was time about a year or two ago. The recovery sucked for a couple of days, but I don’t remember my bill being exceptionally bad (I think my insurance paid quite a bit though).
I think my insurance paid quite a bit though
I only have the free insurance from the state and while the health insurance is excellent and covers every single thing I can think of, the dental side sucks major balls. Getting wisdom teeth removed is considered cosmetic (by the insurance provider), so they won’t cover it at all, and pretty much any good dentist is expensive as fuck for anything but a cleaning or cavity fill without insurance.
My employer uses Cigna and with them it’s $1,300. They keep asking what my pain level is and I keep telling them none. When I explain to them why I’m not getting the surgery yet they seemed absolutely baffled for some reason. They tried to get me to sign up for a medical credit card offering zero APR. I told them does zero APR mean also $0 a month, because that’s about how much I can afford. And again they acted like not moving mountains and stirring the oceans was a me thing. Absolutely fucking wild.
teeth are “luxury bones” of course and require an extra subscription service
They can actually seriously fuck up your mouth very quickly, and you often won’t find out until the fuckery is underway. I had two removed when the dentist told me they might cause future problems, I had no pain, but now they’re out I can actually feel my teeth kinda relaxing? I guess the pressure was there but I just got used to it.
My wife did the same as you. Ten years later her wisdom teeth, in the process of trying to get out, broke one of her other teeth so she had to not only remove them but restore her once healthy tooth. Much more expensive (and painful) this way.
Same thing happened to my dad when he was like 50.
Can still hear the sound of them breaking it to get it out
All four of my wisdom teeth were impacted, and it took around six hours for them to be removed. Thankfully, I was unconscious during the procedure.
Oh this was a fast one, was back in the waiting room within 15m, 10 of which was waiting for the localised pain killer to kick in before starting.
Ah yes how I remember them chiseling my tooth out with a hammer. The surgeon I had was a bad ass.
“You really shouldn’t be awake for this” - the orthodontist crushing my sideways wisdom teeth with pliers so he can rip the shards out individually.
We don’t do general anesthesia for most things dental related here in NL. But after hearing the sound bounce around in my head I wish we did.
Fuck me, my ex-wife told me she wasn’t put to sleep but thank god I was.
Then again I had 8 teeth broken off my jaw because so maybe I was a special case …
For anybody who thinks that animals in their natural environment are all happy…yeah imagine living for decades without any sort of dental care. Evolution is about surviving, not thriving.
It’s odd to me that anyone fantasizes about nature in general being peaceful. Especially when the plot of most nature documentaries can be summarized as “fall in love with this creature, then experience the stress of watching it struggle desperately to survive.”
Evolution meant to tell you to get out of the gene pool.
