this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Showerthoughts

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evolutionary wise, very far into the future would we develop different mouths and very few teeth?

Pills as food wouldn't ever catch on, people like too much about food to just settle on eating pills for the rest of their lives. Even though there is a niche who enjoy huel.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well our mouths wouldn't change just because they are no longer needed the way they were before.
It would only change if there was a negative effect of having a mouth and teeth like we have now.

You could say if we don't need our teeth anymore, they might disappear over time, but that would only occur if having teeth lead to higher death rates and fewer children being born. But we've generally come so far with our technology that we're not really that much dependend on the "survival of the fittest" rule anymore.

If we didn't need our teeth and let those people who have tooth decay die from infections instead of treating them with our modern technology, then very very slowly those who had a random mutation that leads to them not having teeth at all actually have a better survivability than those who have teeth. Buit as we treat them, they have the same chance of reproducing as everyone else.

You could also argue that it's better for survivability to have as few body parts on you as possible that you need to provide energy for and those parts that you have being most energy efficient. So it could be that we at least develop smaller mouths when it's no longer a benefit of having a bigger jaw etc. But this also wouldn't happen because there is no reason why someone would die of having to spend too much energy on their body nowadays.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you aware of the changes in modern teeth due to dietary changes? Basically, we now need braces because we no longer chew such hard dense foods.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

But it's not like the teeth adjusted to our diet because they had to. It's just that it's no longer detrimental to survival to not have perfectly aligned teeth and so those who now have braces are perfectly fine and able to reproduce. Now the future ratio of people in need for braces is only a matter of how many people that needed braces and how many that didn't need them get children and that isn't dependent on their teeth anymore.