The author suggests humans are overturned to repairing skin and blood, but I strongly disagree. People with problems with wound healing can face significant disability and mortality. Wound healing allows us to have surgery and close up with simple sutures. A lot of complications post-surgery in humans and other animals are specifically from impaired wound healing capability. It’s a good trade-off: nearly everyone will eventually get cut open by accident or on purpose. The skins ability to heal is so amazing that many types of wounds require nothing other than some cleaning, the body will fully clot, bridge, build, and scar back to most retained function. Wound healing allows us to heal large burns and even simply leave many wounds open to air.

Complications with healing are pretty brutal. Necrosis, amputation, infection are all common without the built-in cascade we have.

"Some day, your immune system may decide to attack your pancreas."

Immune attack of the pancreas is usually a disease of youth. Type 2 diabetes which is overwhelmingly the diabetes associated with aging is not an autoimmune disease.

Many if not most of these oddities about humans come down to either they don’t affect reproduction, or because humans are social animals. Menopause makes sense because a grandmother will have more successful descendants if she stops having babies and helps her daughters with the grandkids. I would guess the few other species that exhibit menopause are also social animals.

The punishment for Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods and gifting it to humanity, was to be chained to a rock and having an eagle feed on his liver which would regrow the next day.

> And even after taking [immunosuppressants], there’s a 30% chance the kidney will be rejected within 10 years. This is not helpful.

To the author: thank you, you made my day. It had been a very, very long time since I last read an article on the Internet that felt written by a human being - with humor, some poetry, and science.

The lack of heart cancer might be more complex than the OP imagines:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/no-heart-cancer-th...

Because alcoholism forces hunter gatherer cultures into settlements, which are the next stage of civilization and reward those doing that choice?

I am in awe about how wonderfully engineered by evolution the body is. E.g., what we are able to do with it and how it heals itself when we have an injury. Sure, many people would not live long without external intervention, but many others would. I still want to see the robot that can survive 80 active years without maintenance.

Anybody on HN knows platforms to discuss this ?

Shouldn't the question be, "Why isn't everything else?"

I feel like this is obvious. Eventually dying of all the weird body failures doesn’t inhibit your ability to procreate, but if you cannot survive alcohol or other various poisons you’ll never make it to a fertile age.

> Evolution decided the good outweighed the bad, and I expect that evolution was right.

We can expect evolution to do the right thing for the genes. Not for us.

   I greatly resent having to be a biological organism and subject to all the poor engineering and design decisions that entails.

The first word of that sentence implies its absurdity quite beautifully. She resents, therefor she is.

And then this:

  Brains. After you reach adulthood, neurons don’t divide. If some of your neurons die—which happens every day—then they’re gone. If you get a brain injury, the other neurons will try to “learn around” the injury, but the neurons themselves are never replaced.

We need more neuroscience in schools! This summary is technically correct ofc, but to imply that the brain is missing some obviously-better option is absurd. We're meat that thinks, y'all; it's far from crap.

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