zlacker

[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. freddi+Ia[view] [source] 2025-04-26 11:06:39
>>smitty+Q7
Weird that you pull the one quote but ignore the rest of that paragraph which is about how being the leading cause of infertility is exactly the kind of thing evolution normally fixes.

"It’s odd for there to be such an easily-removable design flaw in the human body; evolution tends to remove them. Since it strikes at advanced ages, BPH doesn’t make a big impact on a man’s ability to pass on his genes. But being the leading cause of male infertility sure does. Their explanation is that evolution hasn’t had much time to work on the problem; in animals the spermatic vein is horizontal, and doesn’t have or need one-way valves. It’s our standing upright that yields the problem; in evolutionary terms that’s a recent development."

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