Just had another tooth yanked today, after a month-long ache. No, that's not the reason I came to dislike Obama.
Question: Why do we have huge nerve endings in our easily-damaged teeth? From a Darwinian perspective, what's the advantage?
Consider how recently anesthesia was invented. Consider the billions of people throughout history who suffered until the nerve in a bad tooth died.
Does science adequately explain the human body's many obvious design flaws? Whenever I think of how quickly pleasure evaporates and how long pain lingers, my philosophy turns to maltheism. (Better source: Here.)
I first latched onto that concept as a child, although the word did not exist until 1985. Few people consider the thought permissible. We fear that You-Know-Who may send us into the corn field if we think bad thoughts about him.
Still -- maltheism, or the principle of Cosmic Sadism, explains a lot, doesn't it?
19 comments:
Cannon..Mr God Almighty is just spanking you for being so adolescent and impetuous. Spank Spank.
Wise Up! Grow Up! You have a long long history if being fickle and disloyal.
There are too many splits in your mind. Work on unification and wholeness.
God is One, not many. God has many facets but they are all integrated, complete and whole. Like Jesus, a reduced down, human sized version of God. The perfect role model for us all.
Uh huh.
But I was lucky. A few needle jabs, and I was comfortably numb for the extraction. What about the millions born before anesthesia?
I honestly don't think science can explain pain. Pain is useful when it warns us not to repeat certain dangerous behaviors -- you touch a hot stove, you feel pain, and you know not to do that again. But our capacity for agony seems to exceed its practical value.
And what of the animals? What of the agony felt by the antelope as the lion's teeth sink into the flesh...?
Pain strikes me as a tremendous scientific mystery. There just seems to be more of the stuff than is needed by living creature.
You're aware that voodoo dolls have teeth now ?
"Question: Why do we have huge nerve endings in our easily-damaged teeth? From a Darwinian perspective, what's the advantage?"
We are not eating the diet that we evolved to eat. Tooth decay is the result. Check out any group of people who ate a traditional diet and see that their teeth are excellent; their descendents have bad teeth. (A horrible example of this is the Australian Aborigines, some of whose grandparents were hunter-gatherers. Modern Australian Aborigines are very unhealthy and have rotten teeth.)
I have no idea why natural selection favored sensitive nerve endings in gums, though. Maybe for the same reason that pain in general exists? It does seem that nature could have come up with a better warning system than pain.
Meanwhile, eat a Paleolithic diet.
Read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price DDS.
He traveled around the world inspecting dental carie (cavity) rates of indigenous populations. Interestingly enough people who lived in the bush had almost no cavities, something on the order of 1 in 300 teeth, or 1 in 10 people. But when those people moved in next to white settlements, bam they had cavity rates equal to white man. It got so bad in certain parts of the world, like New Zealand (i believe) that people there were committing suicide, which was almost unheard of in before colonial forces arrived. Turns out jellies, jams, sugary foods etc were the most likely culprit.
I think it was written in the 20's, and this guy Price, photographed and examined 1000's of people. really interesting book. The only problem is nowadays, his followers are zealots and somewhat irrational.
you know... something new for this world!
Time travel, Illuminati, Majestic twelve, skewing history, and "The Cure".
Let's have a discussion about this very very streange interview and story.
http://www.projectcamelot.org/
dan_burisch.html
Regarding nerves in your teaath. Without them, you wouldn't be able to tell what you are eating, and may just break your teeth on a rock, get an infection that spreads to your brain and kills you dead.
Pain is a good warning system.
Joseph, go get some Omega 3D by Nordic Naturals. High Levels of the fatty acid EPA can reduce pain, don't believe me, check out the research of Charles Serhan
Hasturk H, Kantarci A, Goguet-Surmenian E, Blackwood A, Andry C, Serhan CN, Van Dyke TE.
Goldman School of Dental Medicine, Department of Periodontology and Oral Biology, Boston University, Boston, MA 02118, USA.
Resolvin E1 (RvE1) is a potent proresolving mediator of inflammation derived from omega-3 eicosapentaenoic acid that acts locally to stop leukocyte recruitment and promote resolution. RvE1 displays potent counter-regulatory and tissue-protective actions in vitro and in vivo. Periodontal disease is a local inflammatory disease initiated by bacteria characterized by neutrophil-mediated tissue injury followed by development of a chronic immune lesion. In this study, we report the treatment of established periodontitis using RvE1 as a monotherapy in rabbits compared with structurally related lipids PGE(2) and leukotriene B(4). PGE(2) and leukotriene B(4) each enhanced development of periodontitis and worsened the severity of disease. Promotion of resolution of inflammation as a therapeutic target with RvE1 resulted in complete restoration of the local lesion, and reduction in the systemic inflammatory markers C-reactive protein and IL-1beta. This report is the first to show that resolution of inflammation by a naturally occurring endogenous lipid mediator results in complete regeneration of pathologically lost tissues, including bone.
PMID: 17982093 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
sorry one more note , the vitamin D can also help with the bone loss.
"If there is a Universal Mind must it be sane?"-Charles Fort
A variant of your question is Why don't people who understand science teach science?
Did you see Sean Wilentz's latest?
http://www.hnn.us/articles/49349.html
"Department of Corrections: Barack Obama on Annie Oakley and Hillary Clinton
By Sean Wilentz
Mr. Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton University.
In his latest round of ad feminam slurs, Senator Barack Obama has denigrated Senator Hillary Clinton and her position on gun regulation by likening her to Annie Oakley. But once again, Obama has shot himself in the foot."
Poor Barry probably meant Calamity Jane, nee Martha Jane Cannary-Burke, also a star at Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
But did Professor Wilentz need to write 'denigrated'? Is he out of his mind? He, the standard-bearer of the Obama-racism-baiting charges, which some would argue have (ahem) sullied the borders of your blog? I'd like to be a fly on the wall in his office when colleagues Krugman and West ask him where the fuck his brains went.
Or is Professor Wilentz trolling? I figure he's trolling because Princeton grants tenure to schmucks but not to idiots.
Codeine or Vicodin?
Thanks for the responses.
It was a subtle point, but I wasn't asking how to arrest tooth decay -- I was asking why we have such large and sensitive nerve endings in our teeth.
What's the Darwinian principle involved here? I mean, wouldn't the animal with a better pain-avoidance or pain-minimization strategy have an advantage?
I'm not at all sure that we would try to "eat rocks" if those nerve endings did not exist.
gary's response is the most interesting to me.
I did a little reading on pain this morning and stumbled across a wild new theory that pain is transmitted via sound, not nerve induction. Before ye scoff, go here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070307075703.htm
"Normally, sound propagates as a wave that spreads out and becomes weaker and weaker. If, however, the medium in which the sound propagates has the right properties, it is possible to create localized sound pulses, known as "solitons", which propagate without spreading and without changing their shape or losing their strength.
The membrane of the nerve is composed of lipids, a material that is similar to olive oil. This material can change its state from liquid to solid with temperature. The freezing point of water can be lowered by the addition of salt. Likewise, molecules that dissolve in membranes can lower the freezing point of membranes. The scientists found that the nerve membrane has a freezing point, which is precisely suited to the propagation of these concentrated sound pulses. Their theoretical calculations lead them to the same conclusion: Nerve pulses are sound pulses."
The paper goes on to suggest that anesthia works by changing the melting point of lipids.
Seems to me that another mechanism might be to produce a precisely opoosite sound wave -- antisound. This is the principle of the noise-cancelling headphone.
But I can't think of a mechanism by which this could be done.
10:06 AM
Wow. I've just been reading the Wikipedia entry on solitons. THis is pretty fascinating stuff.
Here's the page on the soliton model of neuroscience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton_model
This isn't getting me any closer to an explanation for the Why of pain -- gary's "mad god" theory will have to do for now -- but it provides a really interesting theory of the How.
""And what of the animals? What of the agony felt by the antelope as the lion's teeth sink into the flesh?""
Joseph if you read any first-hand accounts of bear mauling, you will see something interesting... Most accounts are like this one: "She started ripping at my arm, shaking it violently. I thought she was going to rip it off. I didn't feel any pain. It all happened too fast"
When fight-or-flight kicks into overdrive it is arguable that there is no pain... the only pain comes to survivors after the attack. During the attack (and if it were a lion attack-- throughout the kill and supper) there is no pain.
Nature might look really harsh to us, but we do tend to internalize it... or maybe I am misreading Anon7:16's MiniMe MiniGod concept... the one size fits all deity (who's doing such a bang up job!) and who spanks Joe Cannon (do you have a safety word, Joe?)
Weirdly enough, I was reading a bear-mauling account the other day.
But you still haven't explained why the pain is so intense during healing. I mean, from a Darwinian point of view, pain has a function during the attack itself -- pain is telling you "Get out of this situation!" But afterward...? Do we really need quite so much of the stuff?
As mentioned you have to have nerves in the teeth to feel what you're eating. Judging the amount of force needed to crush something for example.
As for the pain from bad teeth, just an unfortunate evolutionary side effect probably. I can't think of any evolutionary advantage it specifically would give, but I can see why pain itself would give an evolutionary advantage. I can also see no real evolutionary *disadvantage* from sore teeth. Sure, you're not gonna wanna feel like breeding for a while, but in the long term it's not going to stop you. No advantage, no disadvantage, so evolution really doesn't care about your pain, sorry Joseph.
Think of the evolutionary advantage an organism would have if it could better sense it's own internal state of affairs. Trying to run with a broken leg, pulled muscle or sprain results in more damage being done. Plus if you were put in a situation of fight or flight chances are you could do neither very well.
href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002079182_nopain02.html">
A good example is those kids who "suffer" from congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA), this is the other side of pain.
Advantage, you learn what you can/can't do.
Dis advantage healing hurts.
Pain is only temporary.
"Question: Why do we have huge nerve endings in our easily-damaged teeth? From a Darwinian perspective, what's the advantage?"
I thought you were aware of how little we know about everything. If we try to calculate it, we might say something like we know less than one-trillionth of one percent about what exists; but we might be off by a magnitude of trillions. Also, we can only make guesses about our own species, assuming we are correct about our self-consciousness. Only God knows what you mean by "Darwinian perspective". But if it's what it looks like, it's not what you think. For instance, the normal, fetal human cranium has quickly (in evolutionary time) got uncomfortably large for the average (and very young) female's pelvis to accommodate easily during her first birth; or the gestation period has grown too long. Darwin wasn't papal, evolution isn't doctrinal. Our brains are probably too big for our species. If you don't grok neurobiology, you can see the same disaster design system in the analogical design system of consumer credit amidst digital technology.
wikipedia will rot your mind. It is INTENTION that counts.
"Before founding Wikipedia, Wales moderated and contributed material to websites devoted to Ayn Rand’s doctrine of Objectivism. When that failed to take off, he started something not much different than an Ayn Rand novel, a soft-core porn portal, called Bomis.com. He moved to California and subsequently founded Wikipedia with his good libertarian buddy from the USENET groups, Larry Sanger. By removing Ayn Rand’s name, but demanding that only material published from inside her hellish world be tolerated on Wikipedia’s pages, hundreds of people were fooled into giving Wikipedia credit for its good aspects, which were all actually unintended by Wales…"
I've already given a link numerous times.
Gary McGowan
Post a Comment