bitWISE wrote:BWAHAHAHAHAHAH what a load of bullshit
http://www.learnthebible.org/q_a_adaption.htm
As an aside: I know atleast 3 people who were not born with wisdom teeth. My girlfriend, my mom, and myself all had our wisdom teeth taken out so I wonder if maybe my kids wont have them. That would own. I think if we were more selective in our mating we would have evolved WAY more than we have.
Yes...we are seeing that happen.
I thought it would be interesting to examine the prevelance of wisdom teeth in populations that have never been introduced to modern dentistry (i.e. tribes in the deep jungle, the Brits, etc.) vs. those that have. Perhaps, and this is just a hypothesis, we might see a difference. For example, lets say that having wisdom teeth imparts some sort of selective advantage or, more likely (again, just theorizing) a selective disadvantage. Maybe having them makes you more prone to infections or something....
But in the states and other developed nations, we simply take them out...in effect negating whatever selective advantage or disadvantage they may have imparted.
This is a smaller example of something I always wanted to look into - how modern medicine is influencing our own evolution...using different populations to collect data (main problem would probaby be sample size with the real remote tribes) as well as a number of uncontrolled variables...
