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[return to "An end to all this prostate trouble?"]
1. smitty+Q7[view] [source] 2025-04-26 10:29:36
>>bondar+(OP)
> It’s odd for there to be such an easily-removable design flaw in the human body; evolution tends to remove them.

I wouldn't say so at all. Poor eyesight carries on smartly. Baldness. I enjoy both.

But an old story about the controller code for a surface-to-air missile comes to mind.

Someone looking at the memory allocator spots an obvious resource leak: "This code is going to crash."

The reply was that, while the point was theoretically valid, it was irrelevant, since the system itself would detonate long before resource exhaustion became an issue.

So too prostate cancer back in the day: war, famine and plague were keeping the lifespan well below the threshold of every man's time bomb.

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2. cogman+L8[view] [source] 2025-04-26 10:42:57
>>smitty+Q7
Evolution selects for one thing and one thing only, reproduction.

The answer to every "why hasn't evolution done x" question is selection pressure.

An enlarged prostate is something that people get in their 60s and later. Most people are done with reproduction long before that event. There is simply very little and very low selection pressure.

It's pretty much the reason why most humans have peak health into their 40s.

Don't expect evolution to "fix" anything for humans that doesn't commonly impact 20yos.

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