The human body is a beautiful machine that processes food, keeps you upright, and basically runs itself so you have time to do things you want. But it’s also a complete mess. 

Humans bodies cause 80% of people have back pain at some point of their life. If you look at other animals and how their bodies work it is so much simpler. The reason for all these mishaps in our body can ultimately be attributed to walking upright. Yes, despite being the key to our rise to the most dominant species on the planet, walking upright is also the source of pain at childbirth and almost all chronic pain.

Pelvis to Head Ratio

Let’s start with the pelvis-to-head ratio. With larger mammals like a cow, birth is no problem because of how big their pelvis is vs. their head. A cow’s pelvic area to birth weight ratio, or how many baby cows could come out at once, is 2.7. A human’s pelvic area to birth weight ratio is 1.15, which makes childbirth incredibly more painful and problematic. 

The pelvis shrunk to be able to support our body and help us walk upright, which resulted in the high maternal mortality rate. One hundred years ago, there were about 800 maternal deaths for 100,000 child births in America, and that number is now down to around 20 today. 

Feet

Another problem with the human body is the foot. The foot is in mid-evolution currently and has way too many bones for it to be an effective platform. Our feet evolved from a chimpanzee’s feet, so they were originally meant to grab branches and such. This creates a problem when you are repeatedly pounding them into the ground over and over again for your entire life. The foot of a larger mammal is usually its entire hind legs, with a hoof making for the base. The metatarsal bones, or the ones in the middle of our feet, make up the entire lower section of a cow’s legs. The tarsal bones, or the ones connecting the foot to the rest of the body, are what attaches the cow’s metatarsals to the rest of their hind legs. Feet are basically the entirety of a cow’s lower half of their hind legs stuffed into and area a foot long and pushed into the opposite way they should go their entire life. 

Appendix

By far the silliest about our bodies, however, is the appendix. The appendix is a part of your body that does nothing, and if it ruptures, you die. The appendix has evolved in a few other mammals such as great apes and wombats, but overall mammals haven’t evolved this useless and sometimes fatal organ. Most people think the appendix did something in the past that it doesn’t have a purpose for, but this is untrue, the evidence of this is not apparent. The appendix has never had and never will have a role to play in any mammal’s bodily functions. It is similar to the Greek myth of Meleager. 

When Meleager was born, The Fates appeared before his mother and pointed to a log in the roaring fire of their home and said: “if that log burns your boy will die.” Then his mother promptly snatched it out of the fire and put it in a locked box where it could sit and do nothing while Meleager lived his life. Later in his life, he did something to anger his mother and she promptly threw the log in the fire, killing Meleager. The appendix is like the log. It does nothing, and if it gets destroyed, you die. 

The human body is engineered to make us smarter, not to make are physical bodies less painful. To me it doesn’t make sense, but several minute details in our bodies, like our large brains and opposable thumbs,  that have evolved over the millennia have made us into the dominant species on this planet, and possibly someday the dominant species of our solar system. The human brain has endless possibilities, and is frankly only limited by the body that holds it. We can do many amazing things, even if our body doesn’t want to cooperate.