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.”
Can still hear the sound of them breaking it to get it out
“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.
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.
that’s me atm. luckily they’ve stopped moving and I don’t feel any pain but it’s a breeding ground of the unfunny kind
Ah yes how I remember them chiseling my tooth out with a hammer. The surgeon I had was a bad ass.
Human mandible shrank a bit the last millenia, probably thanks to the rise of agricolture and easily chewable food, but that left less space for teeth to grow properly
“Intelligent Design”
Fucking LOL
I think a lot of folks assume that evolution means “all the crappy stuff whittled out over time, and only the good stuff remains” when in fact I think evolution aims for “eh, they reproduced. Good enough”
Creationist love to bring up all the wonderful things in the world. They tend not to bring up things like the recurrent laryngeal nerve or bot flies.
In fact, I think they’re confused as to why science would even bring these up. If evolution is a religion (as they often claim), why would that religion point to something so weird or ugly? The answer is that evolution just is, and it does weird and ugly things sometimes. Our job is to study the weird and ugly things it makes while also finding a better moral system than mere evolution.
Evolutionarily, it only matters that you reproduce.
I can‘t even do that. The reason: Skill issue
So that’s evolution at work.
Based
… 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.
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.
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
I haven’t had my wisdom teeth extracted because my doctor said my mouth was big enough. The only real issue is brushing them so I have to clench my mouth almost shut to even reach them while brushing.
I never got all the fun drugs though.
How are we supposed to be taken seriously in glactic politics if we can’t chomp aliens in a few thousand years.
Don’t worry, humans are space orcs
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.
I had to get my wisdoms out before all the baby teeth came out so pre-dentistry I’d have been fucked.
If you’d been fucked (and reproduced), your shitty teeth genes would have made it into the next generation.
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.
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.
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.
This reads like dentistry from the 1800s. You would’ve been a great dentist there. “I need to pull these teeth to make space for what’s to come”.
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.
Your jaw got smaller and you stopped loosing teeth so fast. It’s your own fault, really.
Me: does nothing
Evolution: fuck you
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.
Same thing happened to my dad when he was like 50.
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.
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.
teeth are “luxury bones” of course and require an extra subscription service
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.
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.
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
Born without wisdom teeth…
Not sure if that makes me more evolved or less lol
I only had them on the right side. Not shure what this means evolutionary…
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
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.
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
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…
Well, see, your mistake is brushing your teeth and living past 30. If your back molars were properly rotten enough to gracefully pop out when the wisdoms grew in, and then you died before that one rotted and you couldn’t chew anymore, you wouldn’t have any problems.
Literally.
Ancient humans had surprisingly good teeth. They weren’t soaked in acid and sugar.
Until we got agriculture.
Depends on where they were and what they were eating. Humans are really amazing in that we can eat almost anything that’s not a straight up tree, and we’ve existed across the planet in just about every ecological niche. I remember reading somewhere they could estimate the age of desert burial/skeleton remains on how worn the teeth are due to the sand getting in the food. But I’m sure no processed sugar is pretty beneficial tho
Still may have lost a few from some bucking animal you were chasing after. Or your cousin chucking a rock at the *bird" he said he saw behind you.
Not all. Pre industrial humans where I live ate a lot of slow roasted cactus. After 2 days buried with hot stones the cactus hearts were caramelized. I’ve tasted it prepared in the traditional manner and it’s just syrup in a leaf. Delicious, and I have no doubt it was great energy for people that had to walk miles every day.
Anyone that lived past 30 had their teeth rot right out of their head, according to the archiological record.
It’s because humans in the wild would lose teeth by that time and need more.
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
Watched a documentary on the history of surgery and man, modern medicine is one of the things I’m grateful for.
