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from the ankle-bone-connected-to-the-shin-bone,-shin-bone-connected-to-the...well,-it-depends dept.
There are 206 bones in the human body, but for 39% of the population, that is not enough. According to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Anatomy, a small bone in the back of the human knee (image) called the 'fabella' is 3.5x as frequent in humans as it was 150 years ago. The fabella was lost as our ancestors evolved.
"In old world monkeys, it appears to play a role in knee muscle mechanics" however in humans it's purpose, if it even has one, is unknown.
It might help “reduce friction within tendons, redirecting muscle forces, or, as in the case of the kneecap, increasing the mechanical force of that muscle,” [Michael Berthaume of Imperial College London] says in the release. “Or it could be doing nothing at all. . . .
The researchers did speculate on some of the factors involved
“The average human, today, is better nourished, meaning we are taller and heavier,” Berthaume says in a press release. “This came with longer shinbones and larger calf muscles—changes which both put the knee under increasing pressure. This could explain why fabellae are more common now than they once were.” The researchers suggest that genetics may influence whether people have the ability to develop fabellae, but if they do, environmental factors such as the mechanical forces that the knee experiences likely drive the bones’ formation.
While one's first inclination might be that having an extra bone is a good thing, this apparent 'appendix' of the skeletal system may be more trouble than it is worth.
Regardless of whether it provides a functional advantage, the bone has been linked to various ailments. Its presence can cause knee pain, for example, and people who suffer from osteoarthritis in their knees, for example, are about twice as likely to have it than those without osteoarthritis. The fabella can also create additional challenges for knee replacement surgery.
There can even be two (fabella bipartita) or three (fabella tripartita) of these bones, although this is rare.
Be honest - are you feeling the back of your knee to see if there's something there?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @12:43PM (11 children)
An ancient bone present in human ancestry but almost gone in modern day humans is making a comeback. This is only one more indication of something I've known for a long time: Humans are devolving.
IQ in general is also going down alarmingnly from one generation to the next. Things that civilization has fought hard to eradicate, like superstition, religion, gender discrimination, xenophobia, etc, are making a comeback. Humans are slowly reverting back to barbarism and savagery.
Goodbye knowledge, reason, rationality, science. It was good while it lasted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @12:50PM
> Things that civilization has fought hard to eradicate, like superstition, religion
world pre atheist technocracy (aka industrial revolution): harsh fightings resulting in territorial conquest
world of atheist technocracy: widespread death of civilians resulting in elites increasing their grip on economy and social meltdown and little to no actual conquest as the system is already one
This is civilization eradicating bad stuff I guess? I blame the decrease in IQ.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @01:21PM
progressivism
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday April 22 2019, @03:29PM (2 children)
(D)evolution is overrated. Pretty soon (within 1-2 generations) we will be able to genetically engineer humans to have heightened intelligence, lack an ancient bone, etc. Add in augmented intelligence from AI and implants, throw in a couple of interplanetary and orbital colonies, and you'll be able to preserve whatever you think is worth preserving.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @04:08PM (1 child)
We don't need to genetically engineer people to be smarter, we can already achieve the same thing by actually studying things and working on it. The problem is that most people aren't just too lazy to do so, they're also aggressively opposed to any increases in intellect.
Having that extra capacity isn't going to do you much good if it's not used. And if you don't use it, you tend to lose it over time.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Monday April 22 2019, @04:59PM
The printing press, newspapers, compulsory education, and the internet are all fairly recent developments. Even if there are a lot of lazy idiots out there, a large portion of the population are studying things and know a lot more than a medieval peasant. We may only be noticing and decrying lazy idiots because they have been encountered much more often since Eternal September, YouTube, etc.
But you don't really need 100% of the population to be scholars/academics anyway. We probably don't need to double the amount of physicists if the global population doubles, etc.
I mentioned space colonies. If we have a Cambodian genocide situation in the future, spreading people and equipment across the solar system could prevent knowledge from being lost permanently.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Weasley on Monday April 22 2019, @04:41PM (4 children)
Devolution is not a biological process. Evolution is, and it doesn't reverse course because there is no course unless you can somehow see the future. You're simply projecting your own biases onto evolution. Barbarism, superstition, religion, discrimination, xenophobia are not things that ever left the species.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday April 22 2019, @05:09PM (1 child)
Welllll....maybe. It all depends on your definition. Is for a cave fish to loose it's eyesight to devolve? It's possible to have a definition such that it is, even though it's what evolution would predict. Lots of people who talk about something devolving don't have a valid definition, but some do. In a way it's like the term "deceleration", or "centripetal force". It describes a real effect in a less than general way...but then so does Newtonian Mechanics.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @09:04PM
No, the cave fish evolved to better utilize its available energy by removing a no longer useful organ.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday April 22 2019, @06:12PM
Let's start with a simple statement. We "evolve" back into monkeys.
The next step would be to speculate what is the reason for the change.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pipedwho on Monday April 22 2019, @10:27PM
Evolution is simply the filtration of changes in the direction better suited to not die out based on the environment and resource competition.
Random mutations are filtered by the survival rate, where 'bad mutations' aren't as likely to be passed on and therefore disappear. The opposite goes for beneficial ones. But, neutral ones are neither selected or de-selected. Random probability keeps infrequent non-selected neutral traits from asserting in the population.
Also, there may be some higher probability mutations that occur because certain mutations may take less energy to happen on a molecular scale. Those may be bad/good/neutral. Bad and good ones are part of the natural selection, while the neutral ones may occur more regularly in a population where the original selection biases have changed.
Since selection pressure has changed dramatically over the last few thousand years, and again in the last hundred or so, we can expect certain latent mutations to reassert, simply because they may be a more likely molecular recombination, and nothing is selecting them out.
This extra bone may be on a comeback simply because another gene that is no longer being selected changes the energy required to keep the bone mutation from reasserting. So the environmental change manifests as changes to the organisms evolving within it.
There is nothing wrong with this per se, as long as it doesn't go so far that the human genome changes into something that can no longer survive a sudden regression back to primitive times (ie. see armageddon scenarios). If we evolve into a system that requires high technology for survival, and that technology goes away, then so do we as a species. If we're lucky, some will survive and (re)evolve ('devolve') over many generations back to a state that is able to survive in the new (old) environment.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by VeasMKII on Tuesday April 23 2019, @07:03AM
I mean, IQ hasn't been getting worse over time at all. Let alone that IQ is a poor metric for intelligence, it's still pretty easy to find evidence to the contrary. https://ourworldindata.org/intelligence [ourworldindata.org]