WHY do human beings grow wisdom teeth? It doesn't make any sense to me and why hadn't natural selection removed it from human? They serve not much purpose in processing food with eight other molars in front of them. Even their name is oxymoronic. Having them don't make you any wiser. After plucking them out, you will most likely be stupider for 3 days. The pain, numbness, and the inability to enjoy your meals will definitely affect your intelligence, judgement and reasoning skills. Since wisdom usually accumulate with age, theoretically, elderly folks should have wisdom teeth, but the teeth don't last that long. Most would have been extracted in their teens since they have been know to cause splitting headaches and teeth misalignment. Even if they survived past the teen stage, due to their awkward position, they are most likely to decay and have to be extracted in time to come.
The one and only purpose that I see in wisdom teeth now is to support the dentistry industry. I still don't understand why it cost a few hundred bucks just to pluck one out. Multiply the price by 4 and wala, easily a thousand bucks gone to suffer in pain and agony for days or weeks. If some one actually manage to find a prevention for wisdom teeth growth, he should be awarded with a nobel prize.
Monday, December 08, 2008
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2 comments:
Have you heard of vestigial structures? They are remnant structures of which the genes that encode them ride forward from the past to the present. Just like the tailbone which exists in all homo sapiens, we also grow wisdom teeth as we reach our eaely 20s.
not too sure about the vestigial structures argument. maybe it's cos our molars used to decay pretty fast back in the older days, and the wisdom teeth are meant to be replacements. that's why they grow so close and sometimes impact the existing non-decayed molars. just a guess.
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