- We humans like to think
that we're the perfectly evolved species,
but I get constant back pain.
- I go blind in one eye
and then I get migraines and puke for seven hours.
- Every time I explore a new city, I sprain my ankle.
- I got gout.
- Greg's mom gave him a cane.
(laughing)
So today we're going to go on a journey of biology
and evolutionary history to discover
the perfectly evolved human,
starting with your terribly designed feet.
- Apart from being sexually attractive to some people,
for example, Mitch's sexual awakening
was Gaston's foot in "Beauty and the Beast."
- [Mitch] Like Greg!
- (laughs) Our feet are an evolutionary mess.
Early hominids would stay safe from predators
by running into trees.
You can see how your feet
were initially designed to grasp or grab branches.
Please don't put this on WikiFeet, you freaks.
And the way our feet would grip the tree branch
was with numerous complex bones in the feet,
much like the apes and chimps climbing in trees today.
This is why you currently have the absurd amount
of 26 bones in your feet.
26 bones is for gripping.
That is way too many for just walking around.
So the perfectly evolved human needs the ostrich foot.
Other than humans, birds are the only other
animal on earth that are truly bipedal.
Human started walking upright 5 million years ago,
whereas birds have been running around on two feet
for 250 million years.
If you look at this diagram,
you see that birds evolved hundreds of millions of years ago
with the dinosaurs, even.
Compared to us, Eutherian mammals on the right over here,
who on the timeline of evolution of life on Earth
pretty much climbed out of trees like yesterday.
So it's not surprising that a bird's ancient bipedal design
would actually help our current bipedal bodies.
We have an arch as a shock absorber,
while ostriches only have two toes,
with just a bone per toe,
that act as absorbers and outrigger.
These two toes stabilize the foot in running mode,
but now we must move on to the perfect-
- Ankle.
We have found broken ankles in human fossils
dating back three million years ago.
So we've been breaking our ankles for millions of years.
I don't feel so bad about my ankles anymore.
Our ankles have intervening ligaments and seven bones,
leading to numerous injuries.
So the perfectly evolved human ankles
are also coming from the ostrich.
With these ankles, we'd optimize our upright balance,
locomotion, and deal a lot better with crashes.
This is why ostrich legs have been used as models
for prosthetics for amputees,
and the Boston Dynamic Ostrich Robot
is a long-necked bird copy.
Cassie, an Agility Robotics invention,
walks with the speed somewhere between human and ostrich.
Now, let's move on to something
that has started to bother me
and is a telltale sign of old age, knees.
- Our knees are a particular type of mess.
Some evolutionary biologists argue
that we stopped evolving biologically 10,000 years ago
when we invented agriculture.
And they argue that from that point forward,
we started to evolve culturally.
But then, other evolutionary biologists think
that these drastic shifts in culture
have actually allowed for adaptive evolution,
which actually accelerated our evolution
a hundred times faster.
And that, folks, is an example of evolutionary biologists
battling it out with separate contradicting theories.
This actually happens a lot in this field of study
because we're trying to piece together information
about our human history over thousands of years.
Either way, one thing we know for sure
is that we are not running from predators,
and when it comes to eating food, we're not hunting it.
No, no, no.
I press a button on my measly little electronic device
and the food shows up at my house.
He is lazy.
I know for a fact, you probably do this too,
so do not judge me.
And for this reason, our knees need to change.
Anthropologist Matt Cartmill explains that,
"Evolution doesn't act to yield perfection,
it acts to yield function."
And that's why I have asked for
the perfect pair of Graham's knees.
Who is Graham, you ask?
Graham is a quote-unquote human
designed to survive a car crash
as part of a road safety campaign
for the transport accident commission in Australia.
Patricia Piccinini not only has a great name,
but she also used silicone and human hair
to bring us this weirdness.
Graham's knees bend in all directions
so he's able to quickly move out of the way
of oncoming traffic.
The fact that our knees only bend in one D,
also known as one direction,
is the main reason why they almost always break first.
Graham's knees being so floppy
means that they can retain their structure during a crash.
Me, after I get new knees,
♪ wash-a-widdy-widdy-bad-ba-dee-ba-doo-da-be ♪
Okay, but what about body symmetry?
- Known as the bilateral body,
our bodies have left-right symmetry.
The left side of our body is a mirror image of the right.
Non-bilaterian animals are
octopuses, jellyfish, or anemones,
but there are no non-bilaterian animals
who live on dry land.
The bilaterian body likely began on the sea floor
as bodies made for crawling over surfaces
with direction and traction made their way on land.
Since all land dwelling animals are bilaterian,
we're gonna keep that.
I'm sorry to crush your dream about having a perfect body
that is part sea anemone, but that design
is made for species that don't move.
But you, girl, you're going to be moving
in your new pair of-
- Hips.
This one is obvious.
We will be using the hips
of the perfectly evolved Shakira.
(vocalizing and upbeat dance music)
No, but for real, we do need to change
the reproductive system.
An anatomist named Alice Roberts
actually set out to design her own perfectly evolved human.
Empathizing with women giving birth to large-headed babies
and risking their health,
Alice figured humans would be better off with pouches
like those of kangaroos.
Alice 2.0 wouldn't struggle with
getting a baby out of her system.
And yes, Alice 2.0's fetus crawls out into her pouch
until it completes its development,
so her childbirth would be less painful.
Her baby would be mooching through the pouch,
so there would be no need for Alice to have breasts.
I know some straight men might be in the comments right now,
like, "But we need the titties."
But we're talking functional perfection here.
Also, we'll be taking your nipples and balls.
Male nipples are pointless.
They exist because males, females, and everything in between
come from the same genetic blueprint.
Female nipples matter.
Male nipples are pointless.
So bloop, gotta go.
As for our testes, they hang outside of us,
exposed to trauma, and no one really knows why.
Like some scientists posit
they function better in cooler air,
but elephants, anteaters, whales, sloths,
sea lions, et cetera, tons of animals do fine
with the testes inside.
So we will be tucking the ball safely inside.
- You know what?
I'm gonna start calling you the tuck.
- Speaking of sacks, onto the-
- Lungs.
Now, lungs might seem like an obvious necessity
for land dwellers, but these air pouch things
have been a part of fish long before your ancestors
left the water to live on land.
In fish, the lungs were used for buoyancy.
But even our lungs could use an update.
So with that said, coming to the stage,
your new pair of lungs evolve from a bird
that has ancestors that have been around
way longer than yours, the swan lung, ladies and gentlemen.
Our lungs are quite vulnerable to minor insults
because our delicate alveolar tissue
is responsible for both ventilation and gas exchange.
Meaning the air we breathe in meets a dead end
and has to flow in and out of the lung along the same path.
Swan's gas flow is uni directional,
which allows them to process the air entering the lung
from one side, and leave the lung through the other side.
Plus the density of tissue inside a swan's lung
is much greater than our own.
Speaking of the lungs and breasts,
they're actually two of the most common kinds of cancer,
and cancer is one of the leading causes of death.
So let's address the elephant in the room.
Or rather, the not elephant,
because they have some pretty cool-
- Genes.
And we talkin' denim.
Elephants have much lower rates of cancer,
around 5% compared to over 20% for humans.
And this is because of a cancer-fighting gene called p53,
which is a tumor suppressor.
Humans have one copy, but elephants have 20.
So we're loading this human app with some p53.
Or better yet, we should be studying the bowhead whale,
because this animal gets so big.
It lives the longest and rarely gets cancer.
Bowhead whales are so cool,
they recently found a harpoon in one
that they think is over 130 years old.
So this whale is so fricking old.
The reason they rarely get cancer
is due to a mutation that prevents their DNA
from getting damaged.
To do all of this work, we're going to be using
CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, which is fascinating.
And I cannot wait for it in the future
to give me a dump truck ass.
- We were going to pull a cancer fighting tactic
from the naked mole rat, but...
(screaming)
Ugh.
Just kidding.
We love all animals here at ASAP Science.
Now let's encase these innards with some-
- Ribs.
Ribs are the shield for your inner organs.
So you want ribs that will absorb the most impact energy.
We're gonna go back to Graham for the stronger ribs.
Also, the chest is large and barrel-like,
and his torso is more airbag-like than armor-like.
He's got a number of sacks placed between each of his ribs,
protecting his heart and other vital organs.
And obviously I think we should be removing the lowest ribs
so that we can start to, you know, like-
- (laughs) No, moving on.
Now, we've decided on no neck at all.
I know everyone's the worst fear.
So why on Earth would we do that?
In the 1900s, accidents were
the seventh most common cause of death.
Now they're the fifth.
And our necks are super weak.
Definitely not strong enough to stop our heads
from jolting forward in an all-too-common collision.
A sudden movement of our heads in a collision
cause injury to the spine, and so by removing the neck,
we're providing a little bit more resilience to injury.
Now, onto the-
- Eyes.
I could not possibly do this while driving,
which some YouTubers seem to do,
because I would crash thine car.
Yes, I'm bad at driving, and yes, I'm gay,
but they are not linked, okay?
Let's have our minds be more nuanced than that.
Mitch is a great driver, and he's gay.
Back to our eyes.
I clearly don't have very great ones.
I have glasses.
I need them all the time.
Imagine me driving without these on.
Smish, smash, killed a dog.
So our eyes are amazing.
They are pretty well developed, but not perfect.
They've evolved so that the retina is backwards.
And without going into too much detail here
because we need to get back
to the sex machine that we are building,
but almost everything in your vision is backwards.
So you've got a blind spot because the optic nerve fibers
in your eye are coming in front of the light receptors
at this spot right here.
To get rid of this flaw,
we're gonna wire the eye more sensibly.
And we'll do just that by stealing the eye from the octopi.
AKA octopus.
Believe it or not, our eyes are very similar
to the octopus, but octopuses focus like a camera,
which allows for a better vision
with their light-sensitive super-sized eyes.
So now that we fixed our blind spot issue,
what are we going to do about
these stupid little potato chips known as the-
- Ears.
Now, I'm obsessed with audio and hearing.
If you can't tell, this is my radio voice.
But what fascinates me even more is my dog's ability
to move his ears to hear better.
And arguably, his ears are much better.
We can hear the 50 to 20,000 Hertz frequencies,
but dogs can hear between 67 to 45,000 Hertz.
That's why they seem to react to things
we have no chance of hearing.
Their ears also move in the direction of the sound.
Imagine that, not having to turn your whole head
to hear someone better, just like moving your ear.
Now we're getting to the final and most important parts.
- Nervous system.
Nerve cells control your whole body and your consciousness.
Technically, your whole perspective on life
comes down to these things called ions.
Simply put, ions are tiny,
positive or negatively charged particles.
Nerve cells undergo action potentials,
which are like sudden chemical spasms that create
opening and closings of other ion channels,
which create electrical signals
that travel along cell membranes.
The transmission from neuron to neuron
is achieved by chemicals sent between axons
to turn on or inhibit action potentials in the next cell.
This is an amazingly evolved system that we have,
so we're obviously gonna be keeping the nervous system.
Like, would you rather have a knot of neurons,
like what a snail has?
Not really a brain, but you wouldn't have to be scared
or sad or worry about anything.
- Yeah, like if I could get rid of consciousness
and just enjoy life.
Thinking of our dog or a more simple animal
that doesn't have to stress about those things,
I'd be down for modifications to the brain, to be honest.
- True, then we don't have no susception,
we don't have pain, we don't have fear,
and we don't have consciousness.
Okay, we'll have an unconscious brain.
Time to unveil the-
- [Greg And Mitch Together] Perfectly evolved human.
- Oh my God.
'Tis a mutant.
(Mitch laughing)
'Tis a demon.
Would you reproduce with that?
- I've done worse.
No, I'm joking.
I've never done.
I would not reproduce with that.
Can that reproduce?
- (laughs) Yeah, that's true.
- Are we sure that these modifications
are actually functional?
You know, sometimes you can change one thing
thinking it's good, and it can lead to a cascade
of really bad effects.
- I guess things are pretty good the way they are.
If this thought experiment has made me realize anything,
is that my body is beautiful
even though it does die and get gout.
- And even though my back breaks,
and I have weak ankles and my throat's always sore.
- And you kind of don't like your brain. (laughs)
- Yeah, there's a lot.
I guess I can live with it.
Animals are not perfectly evolved.
Humans are not perfectly evolved.
But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree,
it'll spend its whole life thinking it's stupid, right?
Like there's these ideas that there's
this perfect place to get to.
And people often consider humans
the top of the food chain in some ways.
And I guess in some ways they are.
But it's important to remember
that so many creatures around us
have these amazing abilities
that we often don't realize we could benefit from.
We wanna thank Skillshare for sponsoring today's video
and let you know that the first thousand people
who click the link in the description
will get a free trial of Skillshare premium membership,
so click on the link because it goes fast.
- So we've become obsessed with Skillshare in quarantine
to keep our brains flowing,
especially like while we're stuck at home.
I love this course on nature photography by Chris Burbank
because it taught me how to take photos at sunset,
which I never could do.
And I've been birding recently, so on my nature walks,
this course has helped me take photos.
- Skillshare is an online learning community
with thousands of inspiring classes
for creative and curious people
to explore new skills, deepen passions,
and make life more fulfilling,
which is very important this year.
- There are no ads.
They're always launching new premium classes,
and it's cheap, it's only $10 a month.
Honestly, we do love Skillshare.
We use it all the time.
And when they sponsor our videos, we're so happy,
because we genuinely love their courses.
- We're not even leaving our house.
So it's nice to go into these learning worlds
and stimulate the brain.
- I'm so jealous of people in school, constantly learning.
So now I just force myself to be in school
all the time with Skillshare.
So again, click the link below,
because the first thousand people who do
get a free trial of Skillshare premium membership.
Thank you so much for watching
our wickedly talented thought experiment,
And we will see you next week for a new science video.
- Peace. - Peace.