Top Tweets for #TheEvolutionGap

over 1 year ago

You might find this interesting; taken from #TheEvolutionGap which you can find on Amazon... The Wisdom of Wisdom Teeth My introduction to the challenges of wisdom teeth came during a particularly memorable visit to the dentist. Experiencing sharp pain in my jaw, I learned that my wisdom teeth, rather than making their entrance in a straightforward fashion, had decided to veer off track and cut into my cheek. A surgical intervention was the proposed solution. Having already undergone surgery once before — the aftermath of a dreadful accident that nearly cost me my right hand — I was understandably wary of going under the knife again. I wondered why natural selection — or God, if that is your belief — would have included wisdom teeth in our design. Wisdom teeth essentially are an additional set of late-arriving molars that not everyone is fortunate — or unfortunate — to receive. Approximately 30% of the population never develop wisdom teeth. Among those who do, not everyone receives the full set of four, and a small number of individuals develop additional wisdom teeth. My research into the matter did little to answer the fundamental question: Why do wisdom teeth exist in the first place? What purpose do they serve? Our teeth, much like every other part of our bodies, are the product of millions of years of evolution. So the seemingly inexplicable phenomenon of wisdom teeth that often grow askew and end up impacted makes one question the workings of evolution. The Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA) reports that annually, more than 5 million teeth are extracted, and up to 30% of these extractions are due to sports-related injuries. Further, and somewhat unsurprisingly, men are twice as likely as women to sustain this type of injury, which led me to a hypothesis. Historically, we've lived in far more hazardous times. Although there’s less dental trauma in our current era than before, is it possible, then, that wisdom teeth are a kind of evolutionary insurance, a set of spare teeth ready to replace any lost in our dangerous past? When a tooth is lost, the mouth begins an immediate process of re-spacing, shifting the remaining teeth to close the gap. I had firsthand experience of this phenomenon after losing a tooth in my youth — sleeping without my false tooth in place, I would find it challenging to reinsert it the next morning due to the teeth shifting overnight. This observation led me to postulate that our species evolved to generate spare teeth in response to dental or facial trauma and subsequently re-space the remaining teeth to maintain functionality. Not only are men more prone to dental trauma, they're also twice as likely to develop wisdom teeth. Wisdom teeth development might be an epigenetic response — a gene alteration resulting from stress — such as dental trauma. Our ancestors could have evolved to grow wisdom teeth only when necessary, such as after the loss of a tooth. Here though, our ingenuity outpaced our evolution, and created problems. When we began to build replacement teeth we created some unintended consequences.. According to archaeological records, Etruscans in the 7th Century BC made dentures from human and animal teeth. This practice resurfaced in the 1700s, marking the beginning of our current troubles. If a tooth is lost and not replaced, the mouth re-spaces, providing room for wisdom teeth to grow. This means a less symmetrical and cosmetically appealing smile — which our ancestors likely cared little about and could do even less about if they did. Today, instead of letting our mouths naturally re-space and ruin our smile alignment, we replace missing teeth with dentures, leaving wisdom teeth with no room to grow. This causes them to enter at odd angles, leading to impaction, pain, and a propensity for infection. This is the Evolution Gap in a nutshell: an evolved trait like wisdom teeth once gave us a survival advantage, but our innovation has turned it into a problem, sometimes requiring surgical intervention. In my case, once I understood the evolutionary and cultural underpinnings of my dental predicament, I accepted the need for surgery. The alternative was removing my dental implant, allowing my wisdom teeth to re-space my mouth, and forgoing a symmetrical smile.

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