Evolution just plain sucks. I know this is his rant about intelligent design, but it also makes a good case for how incredibly inefficient, sloppy and haphazard evolution is. Not that it isn't amazing and all that, but anything that seems efficient only looks that way if you overlook the fact that it took about four billion years to arrive at that configuration. A good point WRT us comes up at the four minute mark in the above video where he points out we eat, breath and drink through the same hole, thereby guaranteeing a percentage of us will choke to death yearly. That's not efficient.
1. To understand the quality of a process, you have to know it's goal. Evolved systems are remarkably more fault-tolerant and good at dealing with unexpected insults as compared to complex things humans design. There are trade-offs in evolution that are not always immediately apparent.
2. The results of evolution are not as random as many people tried to assert a few decades ago. If you change the location of genes relative to one another in one-celled organismis, they'll evolve back to their original positions. You have genes in microbes that overlap one another. You have large non-coding regions which have been shown to be functional, once calld "junk DNA." (Destroying them causes pathologies in the organism). You have pseudogenes which have been shown to be capable of transcribing DNA in a functional manner. etc. The more we learn, the less random genomes seem.
3. Reuse of existing components is quite efficient. Would a separate orifice for eating and breathing increase risk of infection or dehydration? What would the costs be? In the ancestral environment, disease was the #1 killer, even if it isn't now. Far more people died from sickness than from choking.
Without knowing costs and benefits, it's hard to weigh the 'intelligence' of a particular design. Humans are particularly prone to choking compared to other animals because of adaptations which allow for speech. But I rather think that those adaptations were 'worth it.'
"Unfortunately, that flexible throat, so useful in talking, makes us susceptible to a form of sleep apnea that results from obstruction of the airway. During sleep, the muscles of the throat relax. In most people, this does not present a problem, but in some, the passage can collapse so that relatively long stretches pass without a breath. This, of course, can be very dangerous, particularly in people who have heart conditions. Snoring is a symptom of the same underlying problem.
Another trade-off of speech is choking. Our mouths lead both to the trachea, through which we breathe, and to the esophagus, so we use the same flexible passage to swallow, breathe, and talk. Those functions can be at odds, for example when a piece of food “goes down the wrong pipe” and gets lodged in the trachea; our fishy ancestors had no such worries. Other mammals, and reptiles too, use the same structures for eating, breathing, and communicating but the back of the mouth does not need to be so vertically spacious and flexible as ours. The basic mammalian structures are arranged so that nonhuman animals can safely swallow while breathing. Tweaking the engineering to enable us to talk has left us peculiarly vulnerable."
http://naturalhistorymag.com/features/04971/fish-out-of-water
It's all of them (including ships and subs). All nuclear reactors are are pretty expensive kettles. 
It seems a pity that some of the energy from EM radiation couldn't be recovered via the photo-electric effect.
Also, on a totally tangental note if we're really at "peak oil" (no clue if true) then we're also at peak helium. Helium comes from radioactive decay and is, ironically, mined. Hopefully, future reactors and nuclear waste dumps will give a thought to helium recovery.
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Topic: WCDT 22-26 August 2011 (1996-2000) (Read 134057 times)