zlacker

>>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.

>>smitty+Q7
Poor eyesight is evolutionarily recent (not enough sunlight exposure in childhood, rare to find in hunter-gatherer societies). Baldness won't kill you.

>>Elieze+B8
I'd be interested to see sources for the claim that poor eyesight is evolutionarily recent.

I strongly suspect it's more a matter of "won't kill you". Nearsightedness is far more common than farsightedness, and it's only in the last two hundred or so years that there's been any major benefit in seeing fine details at distance. The fuzzy shapes afforded by 20/80 vision are plenty enough to hunt a mammoth.

Having 20-20 vision is nice for avoiding lions and tigers, but it's a luxury spec, because movement acuity doesn't decrease linearly with nearsightedness, and movement acuity (plus traveling in groups, as prehistoric humans were wont to do) can take care of business decently-enough on its own - so I wouldn't call it "evolutionary-pressure"-nice.